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1 " The world is blood-hot and personal. —Sylvia Plath "
― Megan Abbott , Give Me Your Hand
2 " Don't take this personally, Kit, but your hands are really big. Did you hassle steer?" "No steer," I say. "Only small-handed men. "
3 " And no sound from outside or anywhere. That must be the thing when you have money, I think. You never have to hear anything you don't want to, ever. "
4 " It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all. "
5 " By telling me, you trapped me," I say through my teeth. "By telling you," she whispers, rain still glistening on her, "I was free. "
6 " But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " A professor once described the brain to me as a great silent vault. A dark theater with nothing playing on the screen. Just electrical charges bouncing corner to corner, like lightbulbs flashing off and on. Science doesn’t yet have any idea how everyone’s private, personal experience of the world springs from that empty vault. We don’t know yet why we sleep or why we dream. What and how we remember. The world is a fiction the brain constructs. The smell of a fresh peach, the punch of a firefly in the night sky. The lilting hush-hush of a first lullaby. The brain fashions it all and we don’t know how, or why. "
10 " When you get away with something it’s yours only, forever. Heavy and irremediable. "
11 " (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 finding north.) "
12 " 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. "
13 " The men's gazes are heavy on us. Heavy and pointed, three dull sabers to our chests. They would be high-fiving if it were them. Crowing and banging tabletops. We don't move or even smile. "
14 " 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. "
15 " My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame. "
16 " are women so much more ferocious in their violence? "
17 " never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises. "
18 " you will have to fight your entire life. And that’s why you’ll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more. "
19 " she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends. "
20 " The world is a fiction the brain constructs "
