Whisper Network Quotes
"The morning that our CEO died, we looked up suddenly to realize the roller coaster had a faulty wheel and we were about to be thrown off the rails."
"How much should babies eat, anyway? I am always pumping."
"We read Lean In. Take it from us; the book was all but mandatory in our city’s female professional set."
"If time was currency, we were all going broke."
"We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt."
"She missed her husband. Or she missed being married. She wasn’t sure she knew the difference anymore."
"We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally."
"There simply wasn’t a clinical diagnosis for selfishness."
"Against all indications, Emma Kate had most surely not won the parental lottery."
"What was so worth it? Because from where Grace was standing, she couldn’t square her big, saggy boobs, pudgy stomach, leaky urinary tract, dark circles, sporadic mastitis, and cracking nipples, with the baby who was skinny, eczema riddled; she dribbled cloudy liquid from her mouth and barely even smiled."
"If Grace felt a kinship with any mothers at all since Emma Kate’s birth, it was with the ones that drove their minivans into a lake."
"I needed a night off," Grace admitted. "I have a baby who has taken up arms against sleep."
"Sometimes I just can’t with her. It’s like I—Hate her?"
"I didn’t exactly tell my husband," she added, sheepishly.
"And you? Grace asked. "The condo that I’m moving into isn’t ready yet."
"We can’t have that," Katherine said. "That would blow your cover."
"I already felt the tightness forming in my chest."
"We would look back on this moment months later and wonder many things."
"But we couldn’t go on that way forever. What’s amazing now is that everyone expected us to."
"Grace would like to outsource the whole thing—what was that called again? Oh, right, 'formula.'"
"She rested her elbows on the edge of the stainless-steel sink and clawed her fingers through the base of her chignon."
"He told me about work and he took my career advice seriously even though I haven’t had a job in years."
"She’s like a living Hallmark card, this eternal ray of sunshine and optimism."
"Since then, the cobweb had only grown in complexity, the needs of her life only enmeshing her deeper and deeper into the silk strands until one day she might at last be gobbled up."
"Because honestly, if that wasn’t success, what was?"
"Money was options. Money was the ability to take risks. To jump to the next level. Money can’t buy everything, we’d always been told. Money can’t buy time. To which we called B.S."
"She smiled the easy smile of someone one-and-a-half drinks in."
"Because enough was enough. That was how Sloane saw it."
"We knew we should have run more errands on Sunday. That we should have changed the bathroom light bulbs and paid the doctor bill that had been sitting on the kitchen counter since last month."
"She was terrible at being divorced. But then it wasn’t exactly a life skill she’d planned to need."
"Sloane hoped Isla’s mother got her hand caught in a garbage disposal, so maybe Sloane was exhibiting some new-generation feminism, too."
"Sloane helped herself to one of the toothpicks with watermelon attached and popped it into her mouth."
"The decision not to respond with what she’d found on Abigail’s phone was swift and instinctive."
"We wanted to do our jobs—was that too much to ask?"
"You think that I’m the first client to try to distract me from making you work hard with conversation?"
"I’m sure that’s relative. For instance, compared to you, Cosette? Probably not. But, more broadly speaking, yes, we do just fine."
"It’s nice to see you again. It’s been a while."
"If you’re asking something, mina, you best be doing it from your knees."
"He asks everyone to blow him. Just don’t do it."
"You may have heard that I’m poised to be promoted to CEO of the company. Chief Executive Officer," he explained.
"We’re all trying to protect each other in the ways we know how and this was hers."
"Knowledge is power. She made knowledge available. She shared her power."
"The only difference was that now we were finally letting on."
"We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex."
"None of this stuff is as black-and-white as people want it to be."
"I felt that Ames had misled me. I wanted him to feel remorse."
"You all are lawyers, but if you were doctors, you wouldn’t perform your own heart surgery, okay?"
"I didn’t push anyone off the side of a building."
"I think this situation has gotten out of control and I think we need to ask ourselves why that is."
"There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women." - Sloane
"But still. Grace felt a rush of love and nostalgia for her friends."
"What if I love my job as much as my baby? What if I love it just a tiny bit, a tiny bit more?"
"You would be free of the wrongful death suit."
"I know that sounds like a lot of money. But for Ames Garrett, that’s actually cheap." - Helen
"We like to discourage tattling. We think the kids working it out among themselves fosters better life skills." - Mr. Tully
"So my daughter was being sexually harassed and she came to you—the adult in charge—and your big life skill advice was to ignore it?" - Sloane
"Failure was a luxury we couldn’t afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight."
"How’s it going," in a gruff voice that didn’t invite more than a mumbled response.
"Drink up," he said. "Then I’ll walk you to your room."
"We pretended to agree that an interest in makeup and romance novels and Real Housewives was any more empty-headed than an obsession with sports and craft beer and video games."
"Oh, well, that’s good to know. But violence against little girls is more of, what, a gray area? Mostly okay? Fine, as long as we’re all good sports about it?" - Sloane
"I need to tell you both something. Okay?" Grace and Sloane waited, expectantly. "I think you both deserve to know, after all that we’ve been through, that—I mean, I think you realized that Ames and I actively didn’t like each other, but, see, there was more to it than that. Ames sexually assaulted me." - Ardie
"It’s not like, it’s not like I went in there planning to say … planning to say what I did." - Katherine
"Thank God, y’all are here." Sloane foisted her heavy purse onto the empty chair.