129 Quotes by Emma Cline

Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty. The.

You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things.

At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person. The.

That was the strange thing – I didn’t hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked for herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans.

That’s how badly people wanted it – to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.

But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne’s face looked as she watched him – I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they’d understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.