Turnpike

“I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls