Isa

“Madame de Merteuil, though indeed a woman highly regarded, has perhaps only one fault: she overestimates her ability; she's a skilful driver who enjoys guiding her chariot between rocks and precipices and whose sole justification is that she remains unscathed. We can certainly praise but it would be unwise to follow her; she agrees with that view and condemns herself for it.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.”
― Megan Abbott, Queenpin