Megan Abbott Quotes & Sayings

The pause that followed felt very important. It was one of those moments in a marriage when you have to make a critical decision with alarming speed and the consequences could last a long time, even forever. — Megan Abbott

Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl's debut. — Megan Abbott

This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly. — Megan Abbott

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift. — Megan Abbott

Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn't have real conversations. — Megan Abbott

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.
Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. "It is beautiful. But it makes people sick."
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.
And then, last week. — Megan Abbott

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels. — Megan Abbott

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something - anything - to begin. — Megan Abbott

But she became Gabby's friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school's water fountains - you knew they would find each other. — Megan Abbott

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? — Megan Abbott

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I'd only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live. — Megan Abbott

No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all. — Megan Abbott

Time to put on your miner's hat and headed toward the bright light. — Megan Abbott

A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement. — Megan Abbott

I think she might cry. In her way, she is. — Megan Abbott

No way," he said, shaking his head, shaking the image of Lise, bare-legged, her skirt hitched high, from his thoughts. "Lise, she's a sister to me."
"Oh," she said, fingertips making circles just above the waist of her skirt. Wider and wider circles.
"A sister," he repeated. He looked at her. There was something scratching again, in the corner above his eye, like those metal probes at the dentist clawing at your teeth. — Megan Abbott

I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places. — Megan Abbott

She hadn't learned, no one had taught her ... that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they're not what you thought they'd be. But you'd still do anything to keep them. Because you'd wanted them for so long. — Megan Abbott

Somewhere in the gluey Nyquil haze, the memory came of standing in the lake with Lise the week before, stomping their feet in the emerald thick of the water. On the shoreline were Skye's hard-jeaned boys with their disappearing tattoos. They whistled at Lise, fingers hooked in their mouths. Let's do it, Lise whispered in her ear, her tongue showing between her teeth. Let's go in. When she woke up, in the purple of four a.m., she could still hear Lise's voice in her ear, high as a little girl's. We went behind those tall bushes. He took my tights off first. It was so cold, but his hands - — Megan Abbott

Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw. — Megan Abbott

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing. — Megan Abbott

All those posters and PSAs and health class presentations on body image and the way you can burst blood vessels in your face and rupture your esophagus if you can't stop ramming those sno balls down your throat every night, knowing they'll have to come back up again, you sad weak girl.
Because of all this, Coach surely can't tell a girl, a sensitive, body-conscious teenage girl, to get rid of the tender little tuck around her waist, can she?
She can.
Coach can say anything.

And there's Emily, keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.
I kick, I do.
She would do the same for me. — Megan Abbott

Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he'd sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985 Playboy he'd found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform. — Megan Abbott

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness. — Megan Abbott

She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone. — Megan Abbott

Then I thought maybe she did know but didn't want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there's all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to. — Megan Abbott

You spend a long time waiting for life to start - the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant - and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for. — Megan Abbott

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another. — Megan Abbott

That's what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It's war paint, it's feather and claws, it's blood sacrifice. — Megan Abbott

It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can't help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour. — Megan Abbott

It is not aloofness, superiority. It's a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn't want to gather close her comrades? — Megan Abbott

There wasn't much to know. Now there's less. — Megan Abbott

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful. — Megan Abbott

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder. The — Megan Abbott

We're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts. — Megan Abbott

Never make eye contact with a wolf. The wolf will take it as a challenge. — Megan Abbott

Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her. — Megan Abbott

But it only makes visible a darkness that's already there. Maybe eating it like that ... " She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie's brain. "Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now. — Megan Abbott

Did you ever look out in that dark and fucked-up world out there and think, how do I let my daughter out into that? And how do i stop her? And the things you can't stop because you're ... because- — Megan Abbott

Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that? — Megan Abbott

People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid. — Megan Abbott

Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing. — Megan Abbott

Pretend you're me, she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.
And it happens just like that.
A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.
And I'm her.
And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.
And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly
right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette
that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath. — Megan Abbott

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it. — Megan Abbott

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings - of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop. — Megan Abbott

He looked like he could tie a knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight. — Megan Abbott

Since then, he could only ever think about his sister, one wall away. And how he hoped Deenie never did things like this. With guys like him. — Megan Abbott

Can I trust you, Addy?" he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no? — Megan Abbott

That's what parenthood was about, wasn't it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn't yours anymore but herself. — Megan Abbott

I haven't had anything to drink in so long, I figured it'd be best to have something I'd probably never want two of. — Megan Abbott

Its not that they want her. It's just they have this feeling, and they're off, Billy, they're way off, but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she's more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precint house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs ... — Megan Abbott

It was the best night ever.
And they hadn't talked about any of it since. — Megan Abbott

I think you should shut the fuck up," Eli said, throwing his bag down with a thud that made everyone on the lab look up. "I think it's time you do that."
Stim looked at him carefully. Eyes darting between the two of them, A.J. seemed to be waiting for something, grinning a little.
Stim shrugged. "Lise isn't your sister, Nash," he said. "They're not all your sisters. — Megan Abbott

She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes. — Megan Abbott

Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too. — Megan Abbott

A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he'd seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.
I didn't spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps. He'd stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands. She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.
He couldn't stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat. — Megan Abbott

Once, a few weeks ago, she'd heard a girl's voice in there and wondered if it was porn on the computer until she could tell it wasn't. She heard the voice say Eli's name. E-liii. She'd turned her music as loud as she could, held her hands to her ears, even sang to herself, eyes clamped shut. She hoped he heard her fling off her Ked so hard it hit the wall. She hoped he remembered she was here. — Megan Abbott

I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13. — Megan Abbott

I figured I'd duck out ... before Goody Osbourne took the stand. — Megan Abbott

If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that. — Megan Abbott

You're going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, Baby your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hand, grinning all the way, she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together. Your mom build pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they're still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens. — Megan Abbott

Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.
You're really just trying to get your heart to slow down.
You think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.
After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it's just you there, and you look like no one you've ever seen before. You don't look like anybody at all. — Megan Abbott

Where'd that world go, that world when you're a kid, and now I can't remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything. — Megan Abbott

Suddenly,I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone — Megan Abbott

They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ... — Megan Abbott

That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix. — Megan Abbott

We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear. — Megan Abbott

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl's backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic? — Megan Abbott

I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love - "
" - I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly.
"But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever. — Megan Abbott

When she returned, there was Coach T. spinning — Megan Abbott

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too. — Megan Abbott

This was their favorite place to meet. It always felt hidden, forgotten. The gold-lettered World Book encyclopedias from the 1980s. The smell of old glue and crumbling paper, the industrial carpet burning her palms.
It reminded her of what you did when you were a little girl, making little burrows and hideaways. Like boys did with forts. Eli and his friend, stacking sofa cushions, pretending to be sharpshooters. With girls, you didn't call them forts, though it was the same. — Megan Abbott

None of us really cheer for glory, prizes, tourneys. None of us, maybe, know why we do it at all, except it is like a rampart against the routine and groaning afflictions of the school day. You wear that jacket, like so much armor, game days, the flipping skirts. Who could touch you? Nobody could. My question is this: The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators? — Megan Abbott

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know. — Megan Abbott

She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders. She has so much pride that, even if I'm weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can't say there isn't something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions. — Megan Abbott

She'd inherited Eli's old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said - Deenie never forgot it - MY PUSSY ACHES FOR U. It had to have been the worst thing she'd ever read. She'd read it over and over before deleting it. — Megan Abbott

Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise's thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything. But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch's mark, the blot of Lise's body that reminded you of what she had been -a plump, awkward girl- before the lithesome beauty took her place.
It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation. — Megan Abbott

He'd tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can't stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He'd never quite gotten used to it himself. — Megan Abbott

Whenever I doubted myself, my dad would say, 'Grab that dream by the hands, Gwennie. Clutch until the knuckles go white.'" "Whose dream?" "It doesn't matter whose dream it is," she said. "Just that it's a dream. — Megan Abbott

...like my own granddad used to say, if you get down to the nub of it, people don't change.

That's not true, Katie thought. Not at all. Everyone changed, all the time. That was what was so hard. — Megan Abbott

They knew each other most deeply through body-warmed sheets and the tangle of half dreams. — Megan Abbott

Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner's shirt a few inches, like I'm shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I'm not afraid, and that I'm not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I'm not anything. least of all what I am. — Megan Abbott

I have another friend who gets what I'm really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes? — Megan Abbott

There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing. - Sophocles, Electra — Megan Abbott

The drone in my ear, it's like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever — Megan Abbott

You never think your life will be that big. Just — Megan Abbott

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn't there a kind of terrible beauty in it? — Megan Abbott

I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way. — Megan Abbott

Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open. — Megan Abbott

...Devon wore the face of a stone Artemis. — Megan Abbott

Thrilling, illuminating, heart-pounding. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy reads like a crackling espionage novel and resonates as only the most compelling history can. Abbott brings to vivid life four extraordinary and audacious women, and runs glorious roughshod over all our traditional notions of the role of women in the Civil War. — Megan Abbott

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all. — Megan Abbott

Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister, though he loved Deenie and still remembered the feeling he had when he caught that kid Ethan pushing her off the swing set in the school yard in fifth grade. And how time seemed to speed up until he was shoving the kid into the fence and tearing his jacket. The admiring look his sister gave him after, the way his parents pretended to be mad at him but he could tell they weren't.
These days, it was pretty different. There'd be those moments he was forced to think about her not just as Deenie but as the girl whose slender tank tops hung over the shower curtain. Like bright streamers, like the flair the cheerleaders threw at games.
Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister. — Megan Abbott

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet. — Megan Abbott

Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away? — Megan Abbott

That was what gymnastics did, though. It aged girls and kept them young forever at the same time. And — Megan Abbott

Because there's a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there's no end to the ways love can. — Megan Abbott

Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? She wondered. Do I look different? Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn't even see. — Megan Abbott

I saw it all," Skye continued. "You should've seen the things your brother was doing to her." Deenie felt something crack and twist at her temple. "What? What did you say?"
"Your brother going down on your Lise. Lise's leg twitching like a dog's." Deenie felt her neck stiffen to wood, her hand leaping to it. She couldn't stop it, or Skye. Why Skye would say
"She seemed to love it," Skye said, jaw out, her lips white. "She didn't care who saw. Your brother didn't either."
"You shut the fuck up. You don't know what you're talking about. It wasn't my brother," Deenie said. "Stop saying that. It wasn't him. — Megan Abbott

This sensible, sensible girl. A girl who knew how to protect herself. Never a daredevil, never stunting without a safety mat, without spotters. A girl for whom instability was the ultimate enemy. Who'd never known divorce or slamming doors or slamming fists. A girl whose home was a peaceful sanctum, even the basement padded. A life that had to be made safe because of the risks she put her body through. She was the most dangerous thing in her own life. Her body, the only dangerous thing. — Megan Abbott