Megan Abbott

“My mom always says, you don’t have a self until you have a secret.”

“Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins.”

showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.

to quote Deuteronomy, The blood is the life.”

She is the golden girl she was always destined to be.

Except this: I can look in her face and know her for who she is, what she is. A devil, a goblin damn’d.

“Listen, Kit, there are some people who are trouble. They can’t help it,” she said, watching me in the mirror. “But let them in, and they’ll swallow you whole.”

The big surprise came later when I learned the scariest part about sex wasn’t the swell and heave of body parts, its comic grotesquerie, but the shattering intimacy of all of it

I’d never seen on Diane before, a smile that was open and wide and pure, one that said, Untouched, please touch, never been touched, dying to be touched, come show me the big, wide world.

“Men. They can’t hide it. They can’t hide anything.”

The longer you’re with someone, the heavier it all is, on top of the heaviness you carry inside yourself. It was too much, taking on all of someone else’s feelings.