33 quotes found
“I took on the shape of a girl.”
“The ways your desire could humiliate you.”
“Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful.”
“Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.”
“The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things.”
“. . . even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill ...”
“It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school.”
“Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you gi...”
“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalo...”
“At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions.”
“But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I ca...”
“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.And that's what I did for Tamar, I responded to her sy...”
“We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something m...”
“It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I burie...”
“I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The tim...”
“A rock, I thought crazily. He'll pick up a rock. He'll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He'll tighten his hands around my throat until my wind-pipe collapses. The stupid things ...”
“She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at colouring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans.”
“Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with word...”
“The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural waysI heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending in carbon monoxide...”
“A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I'd swept from the corners. It took sustained, c...”
“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how b...”
“I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I ...”
“Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy- bad luck was rare...”
