Top 100 Megan Abbott Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Sometimes it feels like life’s about understanding how much opposites meet. Kill to cure, poison to immunize, sacrifice to save.”

— Megan Abbott

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

— Megan Abbott

53. “We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.”

— Megan Abbott

54. “She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I’d only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.”

— Megan Abbott

55. “Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl’s debut.”

— Megan Abbott

56. “I picture him always like he’s looking at us through glass – windshields, sliding patio doors.”

— Megan Abbott

57. “The world is a fiction the brain constructs.”

— Megan Abbott

58. “Since then, he could only ever think about his sister, one wall away. And how he hoped Deenie never did things like this. With guys like him.”

— Megan Abbott

59. “The way men touch you is so different from how boys do. Like they know all the handles and levers. Which felt so unfair, really.”

— Megan Abbott

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

— Megan Abbott

61. “She hadn’t learned, no one had taught her... that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they’re not what you thought they’d be. But you’d still do anything to keep them. Because you’d wanted them for so long.”

— Megan Abbott

62. “There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.”

— Megan Abbott

63. “I was seventeen and there were so many things I didn’t know yet, but I knew about hiding.”

— Megan Abbott

64. “I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they’re this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.”

— Megan Abbott

65. “I always feel lifted the minute I taste real air. The minute I see the sun-scorched signs, the swaying traffic-lights. The lab is gone. But not tonight, it seems. Tonight all I can think of is Diane Fleming rolling into town, starting fires.”

— Megan Abbott

66. “By telling me, you trapped me,” I say through my teeth. “By telling you,” she whispers, rain still glistening on her, “I was free.”

— Megan Abbott

67. “In some animal part of my brain, I guess I thought looking her up might somehow summon her. So I never did. And she came anyway.”

— Megan Abbott

68. “The fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.”

— Megan Abbott

69. “A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement.”

— Megan Abbott

70. “It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can’t help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.”

— Megan Abbott

71. “Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?”

— Megan Abbott

72. “It’s enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We’re all on the same team.”

— Megan Abbott

73. “I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”

— Megan Abbott

74. “It’s that powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else.”

— Megan Abbott

75. “Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.”

— Megan Abbott

76. “Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he’d sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985 Playboy he’d found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform.”

— Megan Abbott

77. “Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?”

— Megan Abbott

78. “Bad things happen and then they’re over, but where do they go?”

— Megan Abbott

79. “And the family that seemed so perfect began to suffer through small and then large tragedies – a wayward sister gone more wayward, the parents’ separation and then divorce, and, most terrible of all, the death of Meg’s older brother in a boating accident. There’s something so intense about these relationships we have with other families during our formative years, and that’s one of the main things I wanted to explore in The End of Everything.”

— Megan Abbott

80. “Then I thought maybe she did know but didn’t want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there’s all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to.”

— Megan Abbott

81. “But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn’t show it. It was high school; you didn’t show things.”

— Megan Abbott

82. “Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellular level, in the blood.”

— Megan Abbott

83. “This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.”

— Megan Abbott

84. “That was what gymnastics did, though. It aged girls and kept them young forever at the same time. And.”

— Megan Abbott

85. “I think it was Freud who said that we’re all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.”

— Megan Abbott

86. “They knew each other most deeply through body-warmed sheets and the tangle of half dreams.”

— Megan Abbott

87. “Dr. Severin was thinking that the brain was a monstrous and beautiful thing. A ravishing chaos.”

— Megan Abbott

88. “The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?”

— Megan Abbott

89. “Many of these men, and the women too, sometimes even more so, would like to use your heart against you,” she says. “They think it’s a ticking time bomb in your chest, waiting to explode.” “Maybe it is,” Diane blurts out. I look at her. Severin smiles. “Maybe that’s our strength.”

— Megan Abbott

90. “To be capable of shutting the world out, even death itself, and surrendering to the body, trusting in its powers, its secrets. No feeling but this. No feeling.”

— Megan Abbott

91. “About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter’s life, about –.”

— Megan Abbott

92. “So many things you never think you’ll do until you do them.”

— Megan Abbott

93. “Maybe the ending was the best part – the only time you saw the beauty in it all.”

— Megan Abbott

94. “She had done this thing to me, burdened me with this vile, howling thing. And now it shuddered in me always and I’d felt I might have to live with it forever. I was right.”

— Megan Abbott

95. “It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.”

— Megan Abbott

96. “You looked like you knew a thing or two, she told me later. But were ready to learn a lot more.”

— Megan Abbott

97. “I can’t deny that I desired her in that moment. Anyone would have.”

— Megan Abbott

98. “Now that I’m caught up in it, I feel a whiff of panic. This is Diane. And just as before, we are thrown together, and just as before, we want the same thing. A prize, dangling.”

— Megan Abbott

99. “The pause that followed felt very important. It was one of those moments in a marriage when you have to make a critical decision with alarming speed and the consequences could last a long time, even forever.”

— Megan Abbott

100. “I didn’t grow up feeling smart and special, the world my oyster, born with a silver shucker in my hand. No one works harder than you, that’s the way Zell and Juwon liked to put it. Everything I have is because I was the dutiful worker bee or because I have no other things to distract me, like girlfriends or wives, like mewling kids or family dogs or a love of weekend brunches and fantasy football, or a single, sad hobby, like solitaire or the Sunday jumble. I have this.”

— Megan Abbott