“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.
You’re really just trying to get your heart to slow “down.
You think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.
After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it’s just you there, and you look like no one you’ve ever seen before. You don’t look like anybody at all.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“I think she might cry. In her way, she is.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“we're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I’d only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.
And it happens just like that.
A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.
And I'm her.
And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.
And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly
right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette--
--that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.
"Love is a kind of killing, Addy,' she says. 'Don’t you know that?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Suddenly,I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“None of us really cheer for glory, prizes, tourneys. None of us, maybe, know why we do it at all, except it is like a rampart against the routine and groaning afflictions of the school day. You wear that jacket, like so much armor, game days, the flipping skirts. Who could touch you? Nobody could. My question is this: The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner’s shirt a few inches, like I’m shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I’m not anything. least of all what I am.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders. She has so much pride that, even if I’m weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can’t say there isn’t something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“We’re all the same under our skin, aren’t we? We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. Things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
“You're going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, Baby your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hand, grinning all the way, she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together. Your mom build pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they're still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from Dare Me
Megan Abbott
Born place: The United States
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“Not knowing… that could be as hard to handle as despair.”
― Eileen Wilks, quote from Mortal Danger
“I've loved you my whole life, Chas, from that first day you took me home after Michelle died. And I'm terrified you'll leave me or you'll stop loving me or even worse, something will happen to you. But I can't be without you anymore." He takes my hands, which are shaking wildly, and swallows.
"Today I watched Mike give away the woman he loves. I can't do that, Chas. I thought I could, I thought it would be better if you were with someone else, but I was wrong. And I swear to you, I will love you the rest of my life and nothing will ever come before you. Please, Chastity. Forgive me and marry me and have a bunch of babies with me, and I'll-”
― Kristan Higgins, quote from Just One of the Guys
“The roles could have easily been reversed. I wondered how God had chosen me to be born into such luxury when this little girl had been born into such hopelessness.”
― Katie J. Davis, quote from Kisses from Katie: A Young Woman's Journey of Faith A Remote Village A Love without Limits
“her unwavering confidence in an arm which she believed to be stronger than all others combined could have raised from her sinking spirit.”
― Sojourner Truth, quote from Narrative of Sojourner Truth
“we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Saint Odd
The Blood of Olympus
Birdsong
The Tempest
For One More Day
Forbidden
The Winds of WarBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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