Top 200 Emma Cline Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence.”

— Emma Cline

104. “I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable 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

105. “There was only a week before I had to leave for boarding school, and seven days seemed too long to be in my father’s apartment, seven dinners to soldier through, but, at the same time, unfairly brief – I wouldn’t have time for habits, for context. I just had to wait.”

— Emma Cline

106. “A distanza di anni avrei capito questo: quant’era impersonale e disorientato il nostro amore, che mandava segnali in tutto l’universo sperando di trovare qualcuno che desse accoglienza e forma ai nostri desideri.”

— Emma Cline

107. “Julian smiled what I thought of as the smile of an only son, someone who believed he would always get what he wanted.”

— Emma Cline

108. “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 behind thoughtless impulse.”

— Emma Cline

109. “It was early June and I knew the solstice was at the end of the month: I didn’t say anything. The first of many silences.”

— Emma Cline

110. “These were the cogent human labors, the daily tasks that staved larger panics...”

— Emma Cline

111. “But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore temporarily as a costume.“-p. 273.”

— Emma Cline

112. “I liked Suzanne but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was struggling to keep pace with her: it was an age when I often conflated liking people with feeling nervous around them.”

— Emma Cline

113. “I didn’t really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving or not loving you.”

— Emma Cline

114. “I’m on a diet where I just share al my food.”

— Emma Cline

115. “Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon. –.”

— Emma Cline

116. “Like she and I were occupying the same song.”

— Emma Cline

117. “I had spoken to my father a few times on the phone. It had seemed painful for him, too. He’d ask me oddly formal questions, like a distant uncle who only knew me as a series of secondhand facts: Evie is fourteen, Evie is short. 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

118. “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

119. “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.”

— Emma Cline

120. “It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other.”

— Emma Cline

121. “Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.”

— Emma Cline

122. “I’d forgotten that doper part of teenage girls: the desire for love flashing in her face so directly that it embarrassed me.”

— Emma Cline

123. “Ze drijven iedereen de woonkamer in. Het moment dat de doodsbange mensen de prettige alledaagsheid van hun bestaan beseffen – het eerste slokje sinaasappelsap, de steile helling genomen op de fiets – is al voorbij. Hun gezichten transformeren als luiken die opengaan; het ontsluiten achter de ogen.”

— Emma Cline

124. “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

125. “I was jealous of that trust, that someone else could stitch the empty parts of your life together so you felt there was a net under you, linking each day to the next.”

— Emma Cline

126. “I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun. The three of them were far enough away that I saw only the periphery of their features, but it didn’t matter-I knew they were different from everyone else in the park... These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.”

— Emma Cline

127. “That was the first time I ever saw Suzanne – her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. She seemed as strange and raw as those flowers that bloom in lurid explosion once every five years, the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty. And what had the girl seen when she looked at me?”

— Emma Cline

128. “The perfect sheets, the chilly rooms: they were stupid things, taken one by one, but all together they were a convincing substitute for a life. One where suffering seemed to have no place, the idea of pain or misfortune starting to fuzz out and seem less likely. And who could argue with that, with wanting to be protected?”

— Emma Cline

129. “En dat was het verschil tussen mij en het meisje met het donkere haar – haar gezicht beantwoordde alle vragen die het opriep.”

— Emma Cline

130. “Linda read a lot: She read books about angels and saints and rich white women from the past with eccentric habits. She read books by the mothers of school shooters and books by healers who said that cancer was really a self-love problem.”

— Emma Cline

131. “Ik mocht haar op een vanzelfsprekende manier, zoals je ook nooit nadenkt over je eigen handen.”

— Emma Cline

132. “People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.”

— Emma Cline

133. “I was happy to twist the meanings, willfully misread the symbols. Doing what Suzanne asked seemed like the best gift I could give her, a way to unlock her own reciprocal feelings. And she was trapped, in her way, just like I was, but I never saw that, shifting easily in the directions she prompted for me. Like the wooden toy, clattering with the silver ball I’d tilted and urged into the painted holes, trying for the winning drop.”

— Emma Cline

134. “The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions.”

— Emma Cline

135. “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

136. “The same fervor as those people who populated the online forums that never seemed to slow down or die. They jostled for ownership, adopting the same knowing tone, a veneer of scholarship masking the essential ghoulishness of the endeavor. What were they looking for among all the banalities?”

— Emma Cline

137. “But then, like all feelings, it passed.”

— Emma Cline

138. “A problem of emotional excess, psychological gout.”

— Emma Cline

139. “But Suzanne got the worst of it. Depraved. Evil. Her sneaky beauty didn’t photograph well. She looked feral and meager, like she might have existed only to kill. Talking.”

— Emma Cline

140. “Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots.”

— Emma Cline

141. “I’d always hated martini glasses – the stem and the funny shape seemed embarassing, like the adults were trying too hard to be adults.”

— Emma Cline

142. “They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed – that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water.”

— Emma Cline

143. “That really makes me sad. They’ve tried to ruin this beautiful, special girl. They’ve made her sad. Just because they are.”

— Emma Cline

144. “A buzzing in his head, a tight skull – certain refrains of songs looped and he said them aloud and smiled.”

— Emma Cline

145. “This might have been enough – to watch him sleep as a parent would, indulging the privilege of imagining happy dreams.”

— Emma Cline

146. “So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. 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. There.”

— Emma Cline

147. “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

148. “He was taking care of himself, because there was nothing to do in this life but take care of himself, make his lunch, and brush his teeth, and try to enjoy his days off. Didn’t he know to hope for something better?”

— Emma Cline

149. “People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses.”

— Emma Cline

150. “He’d asked me oddly formal questions, like a distant uncle who knew me only as a series of secondhand facts: Evie is fourteen. Evie is short.”

— Emma Cline