The Girls Quotes

“The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. 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”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Poor Sasha. 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. Sorrow for Sasha locked up my throat. She”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“but I was past the point of caring, the night stoking a foolish, confused sense that I had somehow returned to the world after a period of absence, had taken up residence again in the realm of the living.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon. —”
― 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

“No-one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my centre so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“We all want to be seen.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I could see she was nervous with my eyes on her. I understood the worry. 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.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Mislila sam da ljubav koju prema nekom osjećaš djeluje kao zaštitna mjera, pa će ta osoba razumjeti raspon i snagu tvojih osjećaja i onda shodno tome postupati. To mi se činilo pravičnim, kao da je pravičnost mjera za koju svemir iole mari.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“That was part of being a girl—you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Gran parte del deseo, a esa edad, era un acto deliberado. Nos empeñábamos en difuminar los bordes toscos y decepcionantes de los chicos para darles la forma de alguien a quien pudiéramos amar.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Daba la impresión de ser algo importante, ese deseo nuestro de definir la forma de cada segundo a medida que pasaba, de sacar a la luz todo lo oculto y molerlo a palos.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Su Internet avevo visto vecchi rossetti Yardley – lo stick ormai ridotto a un impasto ceroso sbriciolato – in vendita per quasi cento dollari. In modo che le donne di una certa età potessero sentirlo di nuovo, quell’odore chimico di fiori. Ecco quanto ci tenevano le persone, a sapere che la loro vita era accaduta davvero, che ciò che erano state un tempo esisteva ancora da qualche parte dentro di loro.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Because who else had loved her? Who had ever held her in their arms and told her that he heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose?”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Hatred was easy. The permutations constant over the years...he wanted me to know what I already knew: that I had no power. He saw my need and used it against me. My hatred for him was immediate. ... The hatred vibrated beneath every girl's face.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“But they would never know the parts of ourselves that 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

“But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore temporarily as a costume."-p. 273”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Todo el tiempo que había dedicado a prepararme, esos artículos que enseñaban que la vida no era más que na sala de espera, hasta que alguien se fijara en ti ... Los chicos habían dedicado ese tiempo a convertirse en ellos mismos”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“The desperate optimism of the born again.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you - the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I didn't want to breathe, feeling like it would be an imposition on him, even the fact of my ribs rising and falling too much of a bother.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“The ease of the moment before he pulled the trigger, how clean and winnowed the world must have seemed.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I was only just starting to learn how to rig certain information with apology. How to mock myself before other people could.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Cease to exist, he urged us, disappear the self. And all of us nodding like golden retrievers, the reality of our existence making us cavalier, eager to dismantle what seemed permanent.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“If anyone was questioning themselves, it was all under the surface, a filmy bubble drifting and popping in their brains. Their doubt growing weak as the particulars of a dream grow weak.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“There was a demented dignity to their resistance - none of them had run. Even at the end, the girls had been stronger than Russell.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“part of being a girl—you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls