Turnpike

“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

“If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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