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

“You are gullible. Surrounded by people you don't know, with your leaders even less knowable, and you are gullible. Someone says a thing to you strongly enough, you believe them. You take confidence for truth. We don't do that. Someone says a thing, we tell them to show us how it is true...But you let people with strong words tell you what the truth is. Kings, emperors, tyrants. You are about the many for the few, for the one.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden

“Lee kept glancing at them and felt like leaping up and yelling, 'I'll be able to prove everything soon! And you'll be sorry you laughed at me.' But she didn't, of course, because that wouldn't have been very British of her.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden

“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