Top 200 Emma Cline Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Emma Cline

2. “We all want to be seen. –.”

— Emma Cline

3. “Ze zocht zo hard dat op een gegeven moment de zoektocht het doel werd.”

— Emma Cline

4. “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

5. “They didn’t have very far to fall – I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”

— Emma Cline

6. “Tutto il tempo che avevi trascorso a sistemarti, a leggere articoli che ti preparassero alla vita, era una sala d’aspetto in attesa di qualcuno che si accorgesse di te. Quel tempo i ragazzi lo avevano trascorso a diventare loro stessi.”

— Emma Cline

7. “Sometimes it seemed like I never really left... That a version of me is always there.”

— Emma Cline

8. “Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.”

— Emma Cline

9. “I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to ’make it home safe.”

— Emma Cline

10. “She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience. As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited – embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

— Emma Cline

11. “I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains.”

— Emma Cline

12. “I took on the shape of a girl.”

— Emma Cline

13. “Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgement.”

— Emma Cline

14. “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

15. “My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum.”

— Emma Cline

16. “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.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

18. “I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms.”

— Emma Cline

19. “How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

— Emma Cline

20. “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

21. “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.”

— Emma Cline

22. “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.”

— Emma Cline

23. “The ways your desire could humiliate you.”

— Emma Cline

24. “Why couldn’t relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate?”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

26. “My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning.”

— Emma Cline

27. “We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law.”

— Emma Cline

28. “And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts. I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms.”

— Emma Cline

29. “And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts.”

— Emma Cline

30. “We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. 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. Suzanne.”

— Emma Cline

31. “It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe – all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn’t love me the way I loved you.”

— Emma Cline

32. “They didn’t have very far to fall – I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself.”

— Emma Cline

33. “A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn’t even need a tragedy.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

35. “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.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

37. “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.”

— Emma Cline

38. “The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural ways – I heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending in carbon monoxide poisoning, a dead quarterback. I didn’t know if this was a problem born of country living, the excess of time and boredom and recreational vehicles, or whether it was a California thing, a grain in the light urging risk and stupid cinematic stunts.”

— Emma Cline

39. “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?”

— Emma Cline

40. “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.”

— Emma Cline

41. “There are 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

42. “Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn’t quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn’t actually about making anything different – she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart.”

— Emma Cline

43. “Life a continuous backing away from the edge.”

— Emma Cline

44. “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

45. “There wasn’t that much difference. Between me and the other girls.”

— Emma Cline

46. “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

47. “Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped. –.”

— Emma Cline

48. “But it was only sad in the old world, I reminded myself, where people stayed cowed by the bitter medicine of their lives. Where money kept everyone slaves, where they buttoned their shirts up to the neck, strangling any love they had inside themselves. –.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

50. “This is what it might be like to be a mother, I though, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere.”

— Emma Cline