I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognizable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me.

— Emma Cline

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

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

No-one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my center so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.

— Emma Cline

Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful.

— Emma Cline

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 treacle 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

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 treacle 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

Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico - it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home.

— Emma Cline

She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans.

— Emma Cline

Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy-bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.

— Emma Cline