Top 200 Emma Cline Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “I took her beauty personally.”

— Emma Cline

54. “The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead.”

— Emma Cline

55. “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

56. “She clung to him like a burr.”

— Emma Cline

57. “I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire.”

— Emma Cline

58. “How they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn’t.”

— Emma Cline

59. “Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty. The.”

— Emma Cline

60. “He’d looked at us like we were butterflies he was pinning to a board.”

— Emma Cline

61. “That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

63. “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

64. “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. Poor Sasha. She.”

— Emma Cline

65. “All the other girls thought the director was making the choice. But it was really me telling the director, in my secret way, that the part was mine.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

67. “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

68. “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.”

— Emma Cline

69. “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. I.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.”

— Emma Cline

74. “For a moment, I tried to see myself through the eyes of the girl with the black hair, or even the boy in the cowboy hat, studying my features for a vibration under the skin. The effort was visible in my face, and I felt ashamed. No wonder the boy had seemed disgusted: He must have seen the longing in me. Seen how my face was blatant with need, like an orphan’s empty dish. And that was the difference between me and the black-haired girl- her face answered all it’s own questions.”

— Emma Cline

75. “The silences between us would’ve been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse – I could hear how happy he was to be gone.”

— Emma Cline

76. “None of this was rare. Things like this happened hundreds of times. Maybe more. The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl’s face – I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.”

— Emma Cline

77. “I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

80. “It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay.”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

82. “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

83. “She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn’t fun, it was interesting, and wasn’t that valuable, didn’t that mean something?”

— Emma Cline

84. “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.”

— Emma Cline

85. “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.”

— Emma Cline

86. “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

87. “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.”

— Emma Cline

88. “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

89. “The moment the frightened people understand the sweet dailiness of their lives – the swallow of morning orange juice, the tilting curve taken on a bicycle – is already gone.”

— Emma Cline

90. “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.”

— Emma Cline

91. “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

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

— Emma Cline

93. “She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake.”

— Emma Cline

94. “Ik was jaloers op dat vertrouwen, het idee dat een ander de lege stukken van je leven aan elkaar kon naaien zodat je een vangnet onder je had, waarmee elke dag met de volgende was verbonden.”

— Emma Cline

95. “I would be shunted along whatever would happen, I understood. However he piloted the night. And there wasn’t fear, just a feeling adjacent to excitement, a viewing from the wings. What would happen to Evie?”

— Emma Cline

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

— Emma Cline

97. “Alex had the sick sense that she was a ghost.”

— Emma Cline

98. “He could do that. Change himself to fit the person, like water taking shape off whatever vessel it was poured into. He could be all these things at once.”

— Emma Cline

99. “The forced conversation. The requisite swapping of biographical details, the desperate trawl for some crossover. Anything to distract from the basic commerce of the transaction, the deception at its heart: as if any of this would make you more attractive, would even out the unfairness of how beauty or privilege was handed out.”

— Emma Cline

100. “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