Sharp Objects Quotes
"Sometimes that's what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping."
"A belly. A smell. Cigarettes and old coffee."
"Good. Fuck her, file it, and come to my office."
"Might be because I’m a woman. Might be because I’m a soft touch."
"I craved big oak panels, a window pane in the door—marked Chief—so the cub reporters could watch us rage over First Amendment rights."
"I’ll go pack." My hands left sweatprints on the chair.
"You could debate journalism or get a Pap smear. No one cared."
"The apartment looked like a college kid’s: cheap, transitory, and mostly uninspired."
"As I took a final glance around my place, it revealed itself to me in a rush."
"In the morning I inhaled an old jelly doughnut and headed south."
"No one wears swimsuits, it took too much planning."
"I wondered if the tooth for a tooth part disturbed anyone else."
"You okay to drive? I promise, I’m not being a cop."
"Nothing to worry about," Alan said, "Amma’s just got the summer chills."
"We Crellins run a bit delicate," Alan said somewhat guiltily.
"I can’t have it wrong," Amma said, "We have to send it back. What’s the point of getting it special-made if it’s not right?"
"Now it’s ruined. The whole thing is ruined. It’s the dining room—it can’t have a table that doesn’t match. I hate it!"
"This is all I want, it’s all I asked for, and you don’t even care that it’s wrong!" she was screaming through her tears now.
"It’s all I want!" Amma yelped, and smashed the table on the floor, where it cracked into five shards.
"Well," my mother said. "Looks like we’ll have to get a new one now."
"I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case."
"The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them."
"But once it was settled—and we all seemed to realize it that summer, the same summer I first found blood speckling my thighs, the same summer I began compulsively, furiously masturbating—I was hooked."
"The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish."
"Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body."
"I can quiet them down by thinking of vanish, always hushed and regal, lording over the other words from the safety of the nape of my neck."
"For those who need a name, there’s a gift basket of medical terms."
"My only other visitor was my mother, who I hadn’t seen in half a decade."
"Why would the older (though necessarily less beloved) deliberately harm herself?"
"I hated to point out to my mother that such was the nature of a bewildered, expiring ten-year-old."
"Why bother? It’s impossible to compete with the dead."
"Alan was wearing white pants, the creases like folded paper, and a pale green oxford when I came down to breakfast."
"Tell us about the Windy City. Spare us a minute."
"Then I’d never have to worry again. When you die, you become perfect. I’d be like Princess Diana."
"The children in the woods play wild, secret games."
"The nurses gave us meds to alleviate our tingling skins."
"I remember not being that surprised. She’d been dying for as long as I could remember."
"I’d save the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting."
"She smelled of purple flowers and wore a jangling charm bracelet."
"I can only imagine how they must have taken the news when my mother became pregnant at seventeen."
"I can imagine Alan, proposing to my mother while pretending to look over her shoulder."
"Alan never gave me his last name and I never asked for it."
"I was considered Alan’s child but never really fathered by him."
"I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters."
"You remind me of my mother. Joya. Cold and distant and so, so smug."
"Even from the beginning you disobeyed, wouldn’t eat. Like you were punishing me for being born."
"But you might feel better about yourself if you tried. Might help you heal. Your mind at least."
"Sometimes I can’t. But right now, I can. When everyone’s asleep and everything’s quiet, it’s easier."
"They had serious tempers. Like scary-time tempers. Like boy tempers."
"It’s like God plucked the best girls from Wind Gap to take to heaven for his own."
"You can’t speculate to the mother of a dead child how that child’s body might look in the ground right now."
"You were never such a good girl when you were little. You were always so willful. Maybe your spirit has gotten a bit more broken. In a good way. A necessary way."
"My tolerance was better than Richard’s, he was already looking glazed."
"I love it when you get all tough reporter on me."
"Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom."
"I remember a particularly cruel gesture on my part."
"She said the words out loud, angry and nonsensical both: oven, queasy, castle."
"I couldn’t decide if I’d been mistreated."
"I am of the very strong opinion that this child is not sick at all. I believe were it not for her Mother, she would be perfectly healthy."
"Sometimes I daydream that Marian herself comes in here, all grown up, maybe with a baby or two. Daydreams can be dangerous."
"You need to believe you’re wrong. When Marian died, I drank for three days."
"Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them."
"A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort."
"I wore my yellow St. John suit, but ultimately didn’t feel good about it—I worry with my blonde hair I looked washed-out. Or like a walking pineapple!"
"It took an hour to calm Jodes down and another hour for Amma to pull the teeth, Jodes crying the whole time."
"I think there is more. Ann and Natalie died because Adora paid attention to them."
"I am learning to be cared for. I am learning to be parented."