Megan Abbott

“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.

We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.
—Marie Curie

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

We were matched runners, and she had a will as iron-soldered as her heart.
Her blood ran cold and merciless.

The perversity of woman is so great as to be incredible even to its victims.

But why, then, he asked, are women so much more ferocious in their violence?
It has always seemed to me that the answer lies in the question.