Susanna Moore Quotes

“The trees in the park swayed and shuddered in anticipation, with delight or dread I do not know.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I know the sort of man who likes me. So I wondered, not for the first time, what secret I might possess, what magic charm or talisman had allowed me to get Malloy's attention in the first place. To get him to fuck me. I am not the kind of woman he likes.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“These things happened to me, too, I wasn't just the perpetrator. I wasn't only the bad one. I want you to know that.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“And I'd said, wouldn't it be easier if you just hit me once in the face, and got it over with?”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I don't know where I am. My mind races. I feel like if I started to run, I'd never stop.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I think it may have something to do with something I heard when I was a kid. Something I think I heard. Actually, I know, know for a fact, that I heard something.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“You like it. I probably wouldn't. I'm really only interested in my own behavior.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“There was something different in his voice, as if he were hurrying me along, moving me past something before I saw it.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I didn't think I seemed like the sort of person who would mind."

"What?"

"I'd have fucked you anyway." . . .

"I thought I'd lose you," he said at last.

"Have you ever told me the truth?"

"Look—" he paused. "People lie to me all day long. And I lie to them all day long. I've done it all my life.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“He was convincing. Lying as cultural attribute. A hazard of the job. And I fell for it. It did not occur to me that he lies simply because he likes it. Lies to bosses. Lies on the stand. He boasts about it. Lies under oath. It's called testilying, he'd told me. Lies to women, especially to women. Starting with his mother and working his way through all of us. His wife. The doll collection. He couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I was finding it difficult to speak with any vivacity, any pleasure. I wanted to get off the phone. I wanted him to feel bad, too.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I do not remember too much now. Certain things. Certain images. All sorts of irrational, irrational because nonsensically inappropriate, pieces of information stream through my head, as if my unconscious were bombarding me with words and phrases, an enemy agent subverting a radio broadcast.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“Sometimes when I am not expecting it, when I let down my guard for a moment, allowing the thousands, the millions of little synapses in my head to work their will, conveying to me just what it is that I cannot bear to know, cannot bear to be known, I do remember.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“As always, I was pulled in by the small gesture. It was all that I knew about him, and it was perilous to me.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“Will you tell me?" I asked.

"Tell you what?" He spoke flatly, as if he dreaded my question and already knew that he would answer it.

"What you did."

"Why do you think that knowing makes a difference?"

"I've thought that all my life."

"Well, you're wrong. Knowing don't mean shit.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I am so ashamed by the things that used to make me unhappy.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“There's something I know but I don't know it yet. It's driving me nuts.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“It began to rain in that rushed and urgent way that it rains in New York.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I wanted to talk to him. To hear his dangerous voice, the voice that he used with women ('Hi, baby, how you doin'? Sittin' on the phone?' The 'hi' drawn out in a low, implicating whisper.) I wanted to hear the coldness that was so deep . . . That coldness of spirit that had made it so thrilling to get his attention.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I was thinking that everything had changed in an instant, changed in a way that neither he nor I might mind.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“His sudden falling-away, his tentativeness, his loss of will, made me dislike him, and I realized that I was disappointed.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“He was looking at me in a way that he never had before. Impatient. A little bored. As if I were not so smart after all.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“Nowhere could I find peace.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I was thinking about that, my heart suddenly full of despair.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I'd kissed him on the mouth, put my tongue in his mouth, and I knew that I did not know how to stop it. I had forgotten how to stop it.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“Afraid, now that I knew what I wanted. What I did not want. I did not want him to hurt me.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“Listen, you don't want me. Only you don't know it. You just think you do. I've been thrown out of a lot of places.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I felt such desire for him, such murderous and vengeful desire, that I was trembling.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“I asked him not to hurt me. It seems to be what women say. And men. It did not stop him.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut

“There is an essay on the language of the dying. The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death. And I will be lucky if I die before he returns.

Give me my Scallop shell of quiet.

You know, they did not print the whole of the Indian song in the subway. Only a few lines. But I know the poem.

'It's off in the distance. It came into the room. It's here in the circle.'

I know the poem.

She knows the poem.”
― Susanna Moore, In the Cut