Alison Gaylin > Quotes

“You know the good thing about digging your own grave? You always make it just the right size.”
― Alison Gaylin, Stay With Me

“If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Even for the luckiest of us, life is mostly pain, with moments of happiness thrown in just to keep us vertical.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Beware of men who can string words together like pearls.”
― Alison Gaylin, And She Was

“None of these monsters are evil. It’s the evil of others that makes them powerful. Beaten down by the world, shunned, robbed of what they love, they don’t curl up and die. They don’t apologize. They fight back. They get bigger, stronger, more terrifying. You are a monster. We all are. Be grateful for THAT.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“there are two types of people in the world-those who matter to his story and those who don't.”
― Alison Gaylin

“That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Open up. Like you rip yourself open and let others see your insides.”
― Alison Gaylin, And She Was

“Knowledge breeds confidence.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“When you apologize that much, there’s something you aren’t saying.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Gift

“He told me to tell him all the songs that make me cry. He wanted to know my favorite books, favorite movies, if my heart was ever broken and by whom . . . He said, 'I want to know everything that makes you you.”
― Alison Gaylin, And She Was

“I don’t want to know the truth. I never want to know the truth. But the truth finds me. And it won’t leave me alone . . .”
― Alison Gaylin, The Gift

“Boredom creeps up on you slowly..wraps its tendrils around and tugs you until you'll do anything to escape it.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Harris Blanchard was a terrible human being. But he was also a kid like Emily was, with a mother and a father. And his death hasn’t changed my life for the better. It hasn’t made Emily any more alive.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I raise my glass to karma—which, I’m
realizing, is sometimes a group effort.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I’ve lost twenty-eight pounds since Emily’s death. I’ve stopped coloring my hair and wearing makeup and I had the bolt-ons removed, and so I am literally no longer the woman I once was. There is no reason to watch me. No flattering reason, anyway.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I am capable. I am capable. I am capable.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“work hard. I don’t miss deadlines or pull diva fits when someone wants a change to the design, even an ill-advised one. From time to time, I catch up with old friends over lunch. I make jokes, even.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“At the time, she’d been pregnant with her first child, a girl, which made her sympathize with me instead of the rich golden-haired boy with the angelic blue eyes and the premed major. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, she had told me in the squad car, than losing a daughter like that.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“check-cashing place that wasn’t open today. No leaf peepers”
― Alison Gaylin, If I Die Tonight

“boredom dulls your ability to make the right decisions. Boredom creeps up on you slowly, wraps its tendrils around you and tugs at you in such a subtle yet constant way, you’ll do anything to escape it. You’ll behave recklessly and stupidly.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“If you’re a karma person, then Ed and Natalie deserved nothing but sunshine and rainbows for the next hundred years. But all they got was enough happiness to know how awful it is to lose it.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I don’t blame fraternity culture for Emily’s death. I don’t blame parties or alcohol or the detrimental influence of social media and online porn on Today’s Youth. I blame her murderer. Period.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Come with me and let’s start all over. I said no, and he got angry. Blamed Luke. The way you sneak out to see him, to be near him. You’re attached to him, and it’s sick, Camille. You’re sick.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“a skintight Elie Saab dress that would have been a lot more comfortable had she opted to remove a few ribs before putting it on.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Gift

“I can feel Luke behind me, his weight shifting. “I’m a human being,” I tell the waitress quietly. “I am not your entertainment.” There may be a change in those eyes, a softening. But I’m not sure. It’s probably my imagination. Luke hands me my purse and phone, which is still powered off. I may never turn it on again.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“It’s the price you pay for being dumb enough to feel secure in your life.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“0001 knew what would happen. If everything went the way she planned it to go and if each part of this giant machine she’s assembled performed her role effectively, she knew very well where the knife would wind up, but how did she know Harris Blanchard would be there?”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“the world is full of young men just like him—unremarkable in every regard, except for the ridiculous privilege with which they were born.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Those comic book conventions where they dress up as characters and fully commit to the roles, the online games where they waste entire days in a cartoon landscape, spending play money and living out alternate identities, even falling in love . . . You have to have one foot in childhood to commit to pretending that intensely, and they do. These kids do. Anyway,”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“At this very moment, Harris Blanchard is happily brunching with his parents in New York City or enjoying the company of his fellow seniors or hiking or skiing and posting pictures on Instagram, his grinning face behind a pair of enormous goggles as he enjoys these final weeks of winter break. My daughter—the lack of her—is the last thing on his mind.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective