Quotes from The Girl Before

“One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Never apologise for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“I have no time for people who don’t strive to better themselves.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“I realize something. I haven't had a single flashback or panic attack since I stepped inside the house. It's so cut off from the outside world, so cocooned, I feel utterly safe. A line from my favorite movie floats into my head. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you’ve been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“He was heartbroken, I say.

Heartbroken, he repeats. Of course. That's the great myth Edward Monkford's spun around himself, isn't it? The tormented genius who lost the love of his life and became an arch-minimalist as a result.

You don't think that's right?

I know it isn't.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat. And”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“But it never really occurred to me to ask myself whether this was what I wanted too,”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Of course I was already familiar with that saying by Mies van der Rohe, Less is more, but I hadn’t appreciated before just how sensual less could be, how rich and voluptuous.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Oh, hasn't he told you? The ones before. None of them last, you see. That's the whole point.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“That feeling I used to have of playing to an invisible audience has been replaced by the consciousness, the ever-presence, of Edward's discerning eye; a sense that the house and I are now part of one indivisible mise-en-scène. I feel my life becoming more considered, more beautiful, knowing that he considers it. But for that very reason, it becomes increasingly hard to engage with the world beyond these walls, the world where chaos and ugliness reign.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“You say just, Ellis says flatly. There is no just with Edward Monkford. Nothing's more important to him than getting his own way.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“I know it must look odd, given that I didn't even know Emma. But it seems to me that almost no one really knew her. Everyone I speak to has a different version of what she was like.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“That was Emma—she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.”
― quote from The Girl Before

“My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat—or in film’s case “run on”—manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. —ANDY WARHOL”
― quote from The Girl Before

“But I see now that our future lies not in building beautiful havens from the ugliness in society, but in building a different kind of society. He”
― quote from The Girl Before

“It's the sketch Edward did of me before he went away, the one he said was fine but didn't want to keep. It's as if he's drawn me not once but twice. In the main drawing I have my head turned to the right. It's so detailed, you can see the tautness of my neck muscles and the arch of my clavicle. But underneath or over that there's a second drawing, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, done with a surprising energy and violence: my head turned the other way, my mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions give the drawing a disturbing sense of movement.

Which one's the pentimento, and which the finished thing? And why did Edward say there was nothing wrong with it? Did he not want me to see this double image for some reason?”
― quote from The Girl Before

Popular quotes

“Hawke," he said. "That's the word you need to be saying.”
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“Rumo!" said Rumo.
"That's right!" Smyke exclaimed. "You Rumo, me Smyke."
"You Rumo, me Smyke." Rumo repeated eagerly.
"No, no." Smyke chuckled.”
― Walter Moers, quote from Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures

“in Cambodia people don’t outright compliment a child. They don’t want to call attention to the child. It is believed that evil spirits easily get jealous when they hear a child being complimented, and they may come and take away the child to the other world.”
― Loung Ung, quote from First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

“To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything.
But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories.
And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Wintersmith

“But even during this sleep—still, still—his real life showed through too much.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Invitation to a Beheading

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