All The Dangerous Things Quotes
"Comfort is a luxury I can no longer afford, and routine … well. I haven’t had that in a long time, either."
"The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is."
"It’s complicated, really, the way I feel about the fans. I hate them, but I need them."
"But what they don’t understand, what they can’t understand, is that one day, they could wake up to find the violence crawling through their television screens, latching on to their houses, their lives, like a parasite sinking in its fangs. Wriggling in deep, making itself comfortable. Sucking the blood from their bodies and calling them home."
"It’s not a story. It’s my life."
"The smell of the marsh now, one single whiff immediately transporting me back there. Back home."
"Exhaustion does strange things to the brain, things that are hard to reason with. Hard to explain."
"There is no way to imagine it until you’re right in the thick of it, living it, and by then, it’s too late."
"That’s the thing about a missing child, the thing nobody tells you: They never die. In a way, their goneness makes them immortal—always there, just barely out of view."
"Nothin’ about grief makes sense."
"Either way, it always comes back to me: the mother. It’s always my fault."
"You don’t have to do this alone, you know. It’s okay to ask for help."
"To be honest, it reminded me of me."
"I didn’t hurt my son. I didn’t do anything to him. I’m trying to find the person who did."
"It’s that feeling again, the one my own mother warned me about."
"Everyone grieves in different ways."
"The kinds of things it can make you believe."
"We had chemistry. A reaction had started—a spark, ignited."
"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep."
"I think it’s the way I’m kicked back in the kitchen, watching as he hops around, tending to the bubbling skillets and boiling water. Cooking feels like a chore when it’s done out of necessity—not for the taste or presentation, but for survival alone—but when you throw another person into the mix, it turns into an activity, a pastime. Enjoyable, even. An intimacy in the mundane."
"That’s what’s so terrifying. He and his ex were on great terms, co-parented their kids."
"Freelance is nice. Working for yourself. There’s a freedom to it."
"All I knew was that on Monday, he was there. And then he wasn’t."
"It’s just hard. Being a mother. It’s not what you expect it to be."
"The violence isn’t always looking for a way in—always poking and prodding at our lives, searching for a soft spot to sink in its teeth."
"Sometimes a lie can be a good thing if it’s done for the right reasons."
"The subconscious mind is both beautiful and mysterious."
"A sleepwalker could do things, terrible things, that they would never do if they were awake."
"They can’t differentiate between right and wrong."
"What’s more dangerous than sleepwalking? Sleep deprivation."
"It felt good for the world to acknowledge us."
"I need to start finding some answers on my own now, without him."
"The beginning is the night Margaret died."
"I can’t live my life in the dark anymore."
"My house sits at the very back of it, the endpoint of the road. Go any farther and you’d drop into the sea."
"Even the plants can’t escape the death of this place."
"Margaret would have been such a good mother. A better mother than me."
"The moment we lost my mother, too. The moment everything changed."
"Our life like a picture, too perfect to be real."
"I don’t even know who’s responsible; I don’t even know who I should blame."
"My mother never hated me; she never blamed me. She hated herself."
"All this time, Waylon’s voice felt familiar. I knew I had heard it before—I knew it—I just couldn’t figure out from where."
"A sequence of births and deaths, beginnings and endings. Love and loss. Joy and pain."
"Maybe I already had my answers—that I was to blame—and I was just searching for proof."
"He always felt like I saw through him. Like his whole perfect person persona was an act."
"Since when did Ben ever sit back and let life happen to him? Since when was he ever not in control?"
"Aren't all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves?"
"But as long as we believe them—as long as we can convince others to believe them—they keep their power."
"Sometimes, the stories we create are about ourselves. Sometimes, other people."
"After all, Ben's words are his weapon. They always have been."
"The violence always comes to us in ways we could never expect: quickly, quietly."
"Nothing about grief makes sense: the things it has us do, the lies it leads us to believe."
"But now it feels like the end. The end of a nightmare that I've finally managed to wake up from."