Emma Cline, The Girls
"It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge."
35 Quotes
"It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus"
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris'. Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold onto it like a blanket. They don't realize it makes them slaves. It's sick."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed. And that's what I did for Tamar, I responded to her symbols. To the style of her hair and clothes and the smell of her L'Air Du Temps perfume. Like this was data that mattered. Signs that reflected something of her inner self. I took her beauty personally."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it —that's when you really have everything"."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school."
Emma Cline, The Girls
". . . even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"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."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I'd swept from the corners. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay."
Emma Cline, The Girls
"She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at colouring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans."
Emma Cline, The Girls
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