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

“This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two.—1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, quote from The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I-I don't usually go around throwing rocks at people's windows. Or saying that I've wanted to kiss you since your first day at work, when you wanted to know why we had three codes for fish sandwiches when we only sold one kind.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from Something, Maybe

“Women make a man want to shoot himself in the head and be done with it.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Rising Tides

“Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

“Why were so few voices raised in the ancient world in protest against the ruthlessness of man? Why are human beings so obsequious, ready to kill and ready to die at the call of kings and chieftains? Perhaps it is because they worship might, venerate those who command might, and are convinced that it is by force that man prevails. The splendor and the pride of kings blind the people. The Mesopotamian, for example, felt convinced that authorities were always right: "The command of the palace, like the command of Anu, cannot be altered. The king's word is right; his utterance, like that of a god, cannot be changed!" The prophets repudiated the work as well as the power of man as an object of supreme adoration. They denounced "arrogant boasting" and "haughty pride" (Isa. 10:12), the kings who ruled the nations in anger, the oppressors (Isa. 14:4-6), the destroyers of nations, who went forth to inflict waste, ruin, and death (Jer. 4:7), the "guilty men, whose own might is their god" (Hab. 1: 11).

Their course is evil,
Their might is not right.
Jeremiah 23:10

The end of public authority is to realize the moral law, a task for which both knowledge and understanding as well as the possession of power are indispensable means. Yet inherent in power is the tendency to breed conceit. " . . . one of the most striking and one of the most pervasive features of the prophetic polemic [is] the denunciation and distrust of power in all its forms and guises. The hunger of the powerfit! knows no satiety; the appetite grows on what it feeds. Power exalts itself and is incapable of yielding to any transcendent judgment; it 'listens to no voice' (Zeph. 3:2) ." It is the bitter irony of history that the common people, who are devoid of power and are the prospective victims of its abuse, are the first to become the ally of him who accumulates power. Power is spectacular, while its end, the moral law, is inconspicuous.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, quote from The Prophets

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