Megan Abbott > Quotes

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“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, The Fever

“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, You Will Know Me

“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, You Will Know Me

“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, You Will Know Me

“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, Dare Me

“Because there's a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there's no end to the ways love can.”
― Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

“I think she might cry. In her way, she is.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“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, The End of Everything

“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, The End of Everything

“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, Dare Me

“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, Dare Me

“I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.

Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.

I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.

And my thunderbolt hit.”
― Megan Abbott, The End of Everything

“When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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, Queenpin

“Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.”
― Megan Abbott, The End of Everything

“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

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

“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, Dare Me

“The fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand