Top 100 Megan Abbott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world is blood-hot and personal. – Sylvia Plath.”

— Megan Abbott

2. “I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.”

— Megan Abbott

3. “You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you’re left in it.”

— Megan Abbott

4. “That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.”

— Megan Abbott

5. “You spend a long time waiting for life to start – the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realize it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for.”

— Megan Abbott

6. “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

— Megan Abbott

7. “You must never be fearful when what you’re doing is right.”

— Megan Abbott

8. “That’s your shadow, my mom told me once. You need it more than you think.”

— Megan Abbott

9. “If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.”

— Megan Abbott

10. “That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours anymore but herself.”

— Megan Abbott

11. “That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.”

— Megan Abbott

12. “Once, a few weeks ago, she’d heard a girl’s voice in there and wondered if it was porn on the computer until she could tell it wasn’t. She heard the voice say Eli’s name. E-liii. She’d turned her music as loud as she could, held her hands to her ears, even sang to herself, eyes clamped shut. She hoped he heard her fling off her Ked so hard it hit the wall. She hoped he remembered she was here.”

— Megan Abbott

13. “The more I did it-the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don’t say it wasn’t.”

— Megan Abbott

14. “Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner’s shirt a few inches, like I’m shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I’m not anything. least of all what I am.”

— Megan Abbott

15. “Give me your hand,” she says, offering hers. “Hurry now.”

— Megan Abbott

16. “When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.”

— Megan Abbott

17. “Things can get pretty rough out there,” he says. “Can’t they? For you girls? You’re all a bunch of warriors, aren’t you? Lionhearted.”

— Megan Abbott

18. “It is not aloofness, superiority. It’s a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn’t want to gather close her comrades?”

— Megan Abbott

19. “There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing. – Sophocles, Electra.”

— Megan Abbott

20. “No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.”

— Megan Abbott

21. “As Katie moved through the rooms, everything reminded her of everything:.”

— Megan Abbott

22. “When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finingt North.”

— Megan Abbott

23. “When you realize, you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head? One morning, you wake up and there’s this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They’re something else that you don’t know.”

— Megan Abbott

24. “Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they’d come for his daughter too.”

— Megan Abbott

25. “Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? She wondered. Do I look different? Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn’t even see.”

— Megan Abbott

26. “Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.”

— Megan Abbott

27. “I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings – of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.”

— Megan Abbott

28. “Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.”

— Megan Abbott

29. “He looked like he could tie a knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight.”

— Megan Abbott

30. “My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.”

— Megan Abbott

31. “Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.”

— Megan Abbott

32. “The memories come in pieces. Little bits of grit too small to pick up even with a wetted finer, too small even to hold in my gaze.”

— Megan Abbott

33. “In this life,” she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the filmy light, “you can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.”

— Megan Abbott

34. “Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something – anything – to begin.”

— Megan Abbott

35. “She wasn’t just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.”

— Megan Abbott

36. “Whenever I doubted myself, my dad would say, ‘Grab that dream by the hands, Gwennie. Clutch until the knuckles go white.’” “Whose dream?” “It doesn’t matter whose dream it is,” she said. “Just that it’s a dream.”

— Megan Abbott

37. “You can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.”

— Megan Abbott

38. “We never know, none of us, what love’ll do to us.”

— Megan Abbott

39. “We’re all the same under our skin, aren’t we? We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. Things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.”

— Megan Abbott

40. “My mom always says, you don’t have a self until you have a secret.”

— Megan Abbott

41. “I haven’t had anything to drink in so long, I figured it’d be best to have something I’d probably never want two of.”

— Megan Abbott

42. “Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.”

— Megan Abbott

43. “The place was hissing with stories told behind hands as she walked into the place.”

— Megan Abbott

44. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. The.”

— Megan Abbott

45. “When she returned, there was Coach T. spinning.”

— Megan Abbott

46. “When you get away with something it’s yours only, forever. Heavy and irremediable.”

— Megan Abbott

47. “Remember that kind of wanting? That kind that’s just for yourself? And you don’t even have to feel guilty about it? You wouldn’t know you should.” Katie.”

— Megan Abbott

48. “Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.”

— Megan Abbott

49. “There’s something crazily beautiful about it, the banks of stacked illuminated signs- Sauna Hut, Sheer Elegance, Waterbeds USA, Chiropractic Here, Benihana, Ideal Uniform- gorse rolling from curbed island to curbed island, across the endless parking lots like suburban tumbleweed. Last week, I watched one roll over a lit cigarette, flaring brightly. If there’d been anything natural in its path, it might have started a fire.”

— Megan Abbott

50. “I don’t really consider any of my novels ‘crime’ novels.”

— Megan Abbott