I should get rid of the photo, I knew, th... - Emma Cline - Quotes.Pub

I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

Emma Cline Quotes

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.

She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience.

How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved.

Peter never wore underwear, Connie had complained, and the fact grew in my mind, making me nauseous in a not unpleasant way. The sleepy crease of his eyes from his permanent high. Connie paled in comparison: I didn’t really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you.

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?

I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love.

I remember noticing for the first time how loud she was, her voice hard with silly aggressiveness. Connie with her whines and feints, the grating laugh that sounded, and was, practiced. A space opened up between us as soon as I started to notice these things, to catalog her shortcomings the way a boy would. I regret how ungenerous I was. As if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease.

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.

It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short.

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.

Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel.

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.

I envied Victor’s certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief – that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols – as if evil were a code that could be cracked.

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love.

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

It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay.

These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile. I.

I was already starting to understand that other people’s admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it.

My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.

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.

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.

When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking.

How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.

We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm.

That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

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