Jennifer

“But I've cared as much, I admit, about people I haven't met. I care about Judy Garland and Natalie Wood and the Black Dahlia. I care about the lacrosse player murdered by her ex at UVA, and the girl whose boyfriend was definitely not working at LensCrafters that day, and the high school student killed in her boyfriend's Shaker Heights home while everyone slept, and poor Martha Moxley, and the woman in the hotel elevator, and the only Black woman at the white-lady wine party, dead on the lawn, and the woman shot through the bathroom door by her famous boyfriend, who claimed he thought she was a burglar. I have opinions about their deaths, ones I'm not entitled to. I'm queasy, at the same time, about the way they've become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I'm queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I'm not alone in my fixations.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

“Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?” “Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.” “The day he gets what’s coming,” says the Maiden.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“What's as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarried by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.
The bystander, the voyeur, even the perpetrator—they're all off the hook when the girl was born dead.
On the internet and on TV, they love that.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

“Alison realized the Cousins usually looked tired and vaguely depressed. It was as though being here and dealing with regular human people was just so much work.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden