Lexie Elliott > Quotes

“Platitudes, both his words and mine, and we both know it --- the reckoning is yet to come. But in the meantime we're operating on a surface level of civility that's nothing short of excruciating.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“Which I suppose it should be; if you're going to kill someone, you shouldn't be insulating yourself from the process. That was always my objection to the use of drones: warfare ought to be immediate; it ought to be bloody, to be close combat. You should be forced to witness, to feel, each and every impact. You shouldn't be allowed to put it at arm's length.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“Writing a second book is not like writing the first. I don't mean that every book is different, though of course there's an element of that. The crucial difference is that when you write your first book, you don't have a publisher, which means you don't have a deadline. Deadlines-well. Deadlines put a whole new spin on this writing lark.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“I follow her lean figure across the bar. Her hair is pulled back loosely in an artful mess, and her maroon cashmere sweater has slipped off one shoulder. Everything about her screams casual, sloppy sexiness, I see how it draws the eyes of almost every man as we cross the floor. It's a wonder we are in any way related.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“Now that I'm directing my attention straight at her, it's hard not to look at her crotch, given her cross- legged position. Her black bikini briefs are perfectly in place, without a hair, or even a follicle, to be seen. I wonder if she waxes everywhere? Or if she's had electrolysis? I've heard that's the norm for singletons in the US-the Tinder generation. A doctor friend told me that even in the UK, everybody he sees under the age of thirty is entirely de- void of pubic hair these days.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“His resentment toward me has gone, at least, although I'm not sure what he's replaced it with. His jaw is tight as he looks across at me with those strange eyes. "She was just scaring him, right? She wouldn't actually have cut it off?"

I almost laugh. That he could have married her married her! and be so oblivious. Are all marriages like this? Is it in fact a neces sary attribute in order for a marriage to survive: some kind of willing suspension of critical thought, so that the person you see before you is the person you WANT to see?”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“I'm grateful, too, for the single-minded focus of young children when food is mentioned---all difficult topics of conversation have been instantly cast aside in favor of intense deliberating over exactly which biscuits to choose”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“I know now. I know how to kill your best friend. You have to go down with her; there isn't any other way.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“Jonathan's apologies are works of art; they are three-act plays. He apologized, and I accepted that apology, therefore it must be over and done with. Except that I still feel the ring of those words. I still feel the weight of the abrupt realization of where I stand in the pecking order of Jonathan's life, the realization that if this, my mother's sudden death, is not significant enough, then there is nothing I can ever do to move up the order.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“Back at the table, Adam has shifted to sit next to Georgie, filling my spot. Their heads are together, and even though one is blond and one dark, there's something remarkably similar in their lean, sparse bone structure, in the tilt of their necks. They look up to see me at exactly the same time, reflected lamplight gleaming in their liquid eyes, as if they are two heads of the same beast.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“We all have hidden spaces within us. Secrets to be kept, for everyone’s sake.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“HOW TO KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND

Method 4: Electrocution

Hair dryer dropped in a bath tub? I suppose it's just about believable and I could probably engineer such a situation. But I Googled it (not on my own device, of course), and it seems that it's actually very unlikely to be fatal. Electricity is lazy; it seeks the path of least resistance. The current will almost certainly run to ground through the bathwater and the bath plug, rather than through the cardiac tissue, meaning that the only thing that gets successfully fried is the bath salts.

How else can you engender a fatal electrocution? With difficulty, according to the Google search results. There are too many variables. AC or DC current. Wet or dry hands. The material of the shoes the person is wearing. Whether the current finds a way to breach the skin to reach the soft, vulnerable, unresistant tissues inside-and how much water and how much fat are in those tissues.

The more I look at this, the more I realize how exceedingly difficult it is to kill a person-without immediately getting caught, I mean. Which is, ordinarily, a good thing, one supposes. Though not much help to me now.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“The damp cold squelching beneath my naked feet is deeply unpleasant”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“Dunc shudders again. "Even for Lissa, that's completely over the top," he says.

"Really? Tell me, Dunc, what is the proportionate response to in- fidelity?" Georgie asks with faux sweetness.

"Oh, come on-" Dunc starts.

"A slap in the face? Or is that just for kissing? What about a blow job, is that two slaps?”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“I'm being hung for a crime I didn't commit, but getting off scot-free with one I did.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“There are things you can only talk about in person, late at night, softened by a blanket of darkness and alcohol.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“Ah, so what's sauce for the gander isn't sauce for the goose then?”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“They say you truly grow up when your parents die”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“Don't you need to check on your mum, though? he asks Ali. "Nah, my brother or Holly are checking in on her tonight."

Presumably she's on her own too, since Ali's father upped and offed to continental Europe. It's odd to think that we have something in common, Ali and I: we both grew up without a paternal presence. I reach for the photo of that immortalized dinner party that hasn't yet left the kitchen. "Is this your mum?" I'm pointing to a small but woman with a smile on her face who's standing next to Ali's dad. Even though I'm looking for similarities, I can't see how she turned into the shriveled old woman, with her spiteful pinched mouth, that I encoun tered in the hotel. curvy

Ali takes it and squints slightly. "Aye. And my dad. Was that taken here, aye? God, she looks young then." There's a sadness around his eyes, and concern in Ben's as he looks at Ali.

"Funny to think our parents all knew one another, and here we are, having a drink together," I muse.

"That might be odd in London Town, but it's pretty much par for the course round here," says Ali, putting the photo down. "Very hard to escape the sins of our fathers when everybody around knows exactly what they were." He glances at me. "Shite. Sorry. Let's talk about some thing much less controversial. Like, erm, Scottish independence or something," he says, tongue in cheek.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“But I noticed that Ali's looking at me again, in a return of that jerky gaze which makes me feel like I'm watching a movie shot in the handheld camera style where the frame never quite stays still.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years

“My husband died, and I thought I couldn't go on living. And then I found out that even before that, you'd stolen him. There's not enough sorrow in the world to atone for that.”
― Lexie Elliott, How to Kill Your Best Friend

“Perhaps these nights in Edinburgh will become more frequent, and I'll be spending evenings alone more often than not. It's an unsettling thought. The Manse is different with Carrie in it. It keeps time better, it hides its other faces, the bathroom door stays closed and the boiler flame doesn't snuff out. It behaves like the mere pile of bricks it ought to be.

God, I will have to cook.

I head to the fridge and eye up the contents despairingly. It's by no means bare, but everything in it requires effort: chopping or prepping or frying or grilling or possibly all of those; Carrie would know. But the fridge door has been open too long; it begins a low accusatory beeping. I close it and consider my options.

Fuck it. I can buy a microwave meal at the village shop.”
― Lexie Elliott, The Missing Years