The Broken Girls Quotes
"The sun vanished below the horizon as the girl crested the rise of Old Barrons Road. Night, and she still had three miles to go."
"The air here went blue at dusk, purplish and cold, a light that blurred details as if one were looking through smoke."
"Everything all right? the driver had asked, something about the panic in a teenage girl’s face penetrating his disinterest."
"No one else had gotten off the bus. The scrape of her shoes and the far-off call of a crow were the only sounds. She was alone."
"The cold wind blew up again, freezing her sweat to ice."
"The shrill of the cell phone jerked Fiona awake in the driver’s seat."
"The first time Katie Winthrop had seen Idlewild Hall, she nearly cried."
"Katie was the kind of girl other girls tended to obey easily: dark-haired, dominant, beautiful, a little aggressive, and unafraid."
"Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls."
"The dead are dead. I have no use for ghosts."
"The fact is, Idlewild has always scared the people here. No one really wants to go near the place."
"Money talks had always been one of her father’s tenets as a journalist. Someone, somewhere, is almost always making money."
"This was Roberta’s favorite time. The quiet, the chill of the leftover night air, the cold seeping into her legs and her feet, waking her up."
"Roberta didn’t mind—all she wanted, really, was to play."
"Idlewild was an island on its own, just as it was in everything else, so the girls only played one another."
"She stopped feeling homesick, remembering her bedroom, its view out the window down their neat, tidy street, the quilt on her bed that her grandmother had sewn."
"Her concerned parents had taken her to a doctor at first, wondering if something was physically wrong."
"It had felt miraculous, saying those words, and yet it had felt natural, too."
"Malcolm Sheridan lived alone in the tiny bungalow they’d lived in as a family, withdrawing further and further into the world inside his formidable brain."
"He had wanted to save the world. Until Deb died, and all that protest spirit died with her."
"This is the most ambitious thing you’ve ever written, isn’t it?"
"Idlewild was a monster of a building, not high but massively long, rowed with windows that dully reflected the gray sky through a film of dirt."
"It was enough to hear his voice, short at first, then growing harsh and tense."
"CeCe was hungry from morning to night, her body empty as a hollowed-out log."
"No one looked forward to meals in the dining hall, because the dining hall was horrible."
"It wasn’t easy. I had to give Pat ten dollars."
"I hear it’s juicy. Pat says there are even bad words in it. And they do things."
"What could be so horrible that it could be brought back by the sight of two girls fighting?"
"The water had been a long time ago. And it had been an accident."
"There was a smell. Wet, rancid. Digging into the back of the brain, traveling down the spine."
"In there, the center of the hole was pitch-black, as if it led into the depths of somewhere light could not go."
"No one loved it there. Those girls were trouble. They made life miserable for all of us. They weren't good girls. Not at all."
"Teaching is all I know, Fiona. It's what I do. Or what I did, at least."
"No one cares about Aunt Sairy anymore. No one ever has. She's a good woman. If you publish one bad word about her, I'll come find you and sue you."
"Sonia ran away from her own relatives, so it was decided. I couldn't say anything. I was new, but even then I understood."
"You can sit there and judge. But you spend twenty-nine years at Idlewild. I was on edge every day. It's a hard place, an awful place."
"What girl runs away with no suitcase? I ask you. Her friends were beside themselves, but the case was closed and we all moved on. But I always thought she was dead."
"She ran away, they said. I remember that day. My first year. She went off to see relatives and never came back."
"We didn't have social services or child psychologists in those days. We didn't have Oprah or Dr. Phil. Parents just didn't know what to do."
"It wasn't like now, when everybody's business is all over the Internet, for the world to see."
"You have to understand that Aunt Sairy has a good heart. She meant well."
"Hell, they're worthless. You can have every single one of them for all I care."
"It wasn't a prank! Katie screamed at the closed door."
"Mrs. Patton pretends she has a husband but she doesn't."
"Maybe I should kill them after all," she thought.
"Mary Hand walks on Old Barrons Road at night. She sucks blood."
"This case. If you're writing a follow-up about it twenty years later, you need to add that people here haven't forgotten."
"If you ever find that you can predict Mother, then you know her better than I do. And I’ve known her all my life."
"I used to daydream that Dad would come and sweep my mother off her feet and marry her."
"You're my sister, right? It's the least I can do."
"It wasn’t the work that the girls loathed—it was the garden itself."
"I think something’s wrong with her," Margaret Kevin piped up.
"It was more real to me than you are right now."
"They’d gotten this far, all of them. Without breaking, without dying."
"Someday, by God, I’m going to get out of here. Someday we all will."
"You look surprised. I’m good friends with Jack Friesen, who owns the security company they hired out at Idlewild."
"I’d think the last place you’d want to be is at Idlewild when they found another body. But I guess I’m wrong."
"So few people understand that you have to look out for your own best interests. All the time."
"Everyone remembers, but no one remembers it quite like I do."
"There is no one to look for her if she disappears. No one to care."
"You could write books, articles. You could be published. Then you wouldn’t have to get married."
"It was a matter of living long enough while those around you died."
"To do the research I do, you must understand the mind-set of those times."
"You think like someone of the modern generation."
"She has come from a camp in which every record was obliterated."
"Most of those women became anonymous when the records were burned."
"It’s a tad upsetting, isn’t it? We like to believe that women wouldn’t do such things to other women—send them into the gas chambers with their children, put them in the ovens."
"Firsthand experience is nothing to write home about, believe me."
"No one ever talked about the war in those days."
"People who don’t know Idlewild look at it and think it might be a good investment. They are quite wrong."
"Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land."
"She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!"
"What’s in here," she said. "And what’s in here." She pointed to Fiona’s heart. "It’s how she frightens us all."
"There is no justice, but we stand for it anyway. Justice is the ideal, but justice is not the reality."
"Meet me behind the church at eleven o’clock, You’re not looking hard enough."
"If they don’t want you, come back. We’ll be here."
"Sweet dreams of you, sweet dreams are true . . . sweet dreams of us saying, ‘Yes, I do . . .’"
"You want answers, Closure, right? That’s what they call it. The therapists and group sessions and grief counselors. They don’t talk about what a load of bullshit that is."
"Just because he committed that crime doesn’t mean he committed this one."
"This case has already taken your parents’ marriage and your mother’s life. What’s a little more misery for the pile?"
"It’s always the boyfriend. It’s always the boyfriend."
"It was infuriating how many people got things wrong about you when you were a teenage girl, but as she had learned to do, Katie took her anger and made it into something else."
"Her anger fed it, like wood being fed into a fire."
"It wasn’t easy, figuring these things out alone. And it wasn’t fun, either."
"Eliminate the impossible, and what’s left must be the truth."
"I’ve heard Stephen’s story. He’s wanted to talk to you for a long time. I take it he finally did."
"The fact that the cops had backed off from the Christophers meant they’d left part of the investigation undone."
"It’s small things, you know? Or so it seems."
"I started to think I could just wait it out, and after Dad was gone, I could help the force be different. Do things different."
"I’m not going to drop it, Fee. I’m going to take it as far as it can go. I’m done."
"Sex with Jamie was never rushed; he liked to take his time, go slow, as if he was studying her."
"What that girl does is cruel, a violation of everything that’s good and right."
"I believe in that one. And I’ve seen her walk the road and through the trees, but I’ve never gone back across Old Barrons Road again."
"Because the people who got to me got to them. It was Garrett’s force, and they were Garrett’s cops, every last one of them—none of them was honest."
"I thought being a cop was fun, and Dad was chief, so everyone treated him like a boss. What’s not to like?"
"You’re Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter. You’ve lived life. You know this place, but you don’t quite buy it, don’t quite buy anything."
"All that risk, all that danger to cover him up, and Tim has been in prison for two decades."
"I thought we were friends, colleagues—family, even. But Tim screwed up, and suddenly if any of it had come out in court, they’d have hung me out to dry without a second thought."
"Tim killed her, but it was you who helped him clean it up."
"She wouldn’t have been found so fast if she wasn’t in the field, and I would have had the chance to move her."