Jess Lourey > Quotes

“And once I opened up all that real estate where before I’d been holding anger and regret, I found a lot of things were simpler than I’d made them.”
― Jess Lourey, January Thaw

“You’ll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because they’ll expect you to carry their load. They’ll smother your anger with their pain, they’ll make you doubt yourself, and they’ll tell you they love you the whole time. Some do it big, like Ed, but most do it in quiet steps, like your father.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“The law might not recognize it, but fifteen’s a girl and sixteen a woman, and you get no map from one land to the next. They air-drop you in, booting a bag of Kissing Potion lip gloss and off-the-shoulder blouses after you. As you’re plummeting, trying to release your parachute and grab for that bag at the same time, they holler out you’re pretty, like they’re giving you some sort of gift, some vital key, but really, it’s meant to distract you from yanking your cord. Girls who land broken are easy prey.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldn’t have the hate to do alone. It’s no excuse, just something you should know.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“in the future, you might not want to wear so much makeup. You don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.” Maureen’s shoulders tightened. “Why don’t you tell them to stop looking instead of us to stop shining?”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“He watched a lot of TV. I guess many people did. Maybe like him, they preferred their lives delivered to them in a box.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“The trick of life,” she said, “is that you can’t hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“there's no point in mourning mistakes when you can fix them”
― Jess Lourey, The Toadhouse Trilogy

“I’d been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“There’s also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing you’re prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“In our neighborhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“I stared across the crackling fire at Brenda, the glow lighting up her heart-shaped face. My love for her was carved into my bones.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“I heard the distaste in her voice, the disdain for people who lived in trailers. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but there it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought of people who lived in houses with scary drunks, but I didn’t. Those sorts of questions only made her angry.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“He wore his anger like knives, and you didn’t want them aimed at you.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Was it contagious, the emptiness I felt? Was he worried he’d catch it?”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“I let the fireflies lead the way, dancing just ahead of me, sparkling as I passed and then dimming to nothing.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“Remember the good, only the good. Don’t borrow trouble from the past.”
― Jess Lourey, Bloodline

“Their family and friends are the only ones who can understand the depths of their grief, the life’s work of creating meaning in loss, of having their world shaped by violence they couldn’t see coming and did not deserve.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“Every woman should have pearls,” Mom said, “to remind ourselves that grit under pressure becomes beauty.”
― Jess Lourey, Bloodline

“Smile girls, you'll look so much prettier.

So I'll damn well decide for myself when I'm ready to smile.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“As far as she could tell, men didn’t have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“She stared up at him, at this man-she-knew-who-was-a-stranger, this person who’d risked everything in his world to kidnap another human so he could thrust away like a zoo monkey whenever he wanted. This loser had made a biological act so imperative that he was willing to go to prison to feel the same relief he could get with his own hand.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“All this time I’d thought of Aunt Jin as a hero. Well, here’s something you should know: heroes are willing to pause their own lives to help you. Jin wasn’t that. She was a regular person.”
― Jess Lourey, Unspeakable Things

“You’ll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because they’ll expect you to carry their load. They’ll smother your anger with their pain, they’ll make you doubt yourself, and they’ll tell you they love you the whole time.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“They weren’t misguided, these men who couldn’t take a hint, who kept at a woman who was clearly uninterested. They were broken. Few of them would go so far as kidnapping, sure, but every one of them was after someone they could make feel less than, someone they imagined was beneath them, and they believed every woman was beneath them.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“(I recommend researching Gilles de Rais if you’re low on nightmare fuel),”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“In our neighborhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth. Those were the rules.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls

“I entered a different world. You’ve felt yourself on the edge of it when a cherry song hits the radio. You’re driving, windows rolled down to the nubs, a warm breeze kissing your neck, the world tasting like hope and blue sky. Turn it up! Your hips can’t help but wiggle. Man, it feels like that song was written for you, like you’re gorgeous and loved and the entire planet is in order. But here’s the thing they don’t tell you: That magic, king-or-queen-of-the-world sensation? It’s a million times better when you’re the one playing the music. Maybe even a billion.”
― Jess Lourey, The Quarry Girls