The Girl Before Quotes
"Life's too short to spend it in the wrong relationship."
"Maybe it's a kind of experiment. An experiment in living."
"It's like he feels responsible because he wasn't there."
"Survivors of assault often blame themselves rather than the attacker."
"It's a sign you're making decisions again. Regaining control."
"But people do come through this kind of trauma. You just have to accept that it takes time."
"What's up, Em? Simon says, noticing my discomfort."
"Never apologize for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick."
"But what if we strip all that away? There’s a kind of purity to a relationship unencumbered by convention, a sense of simplicity and freedom."
"Human relationships, like human lives, tend to accumulate the unnecessary."
"And when I want something, I pursue it. But I want to be very clear with you what it is I’m suggesting."
"We’re all mostly water. So water is, quite literally, a big part of us."
"My buildings make demands of people, Jane. I believe they’re not intolerable."
"Sadly, I don't think nice and solid is my type."
"Sometimes we’re simply not ready to face up to the truth."
"Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived."
"Sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them."
"If I have to listen to one more speech about the importance of programmatic requirements I think I’ll go mad."
"I’ve never had a relationship like this before."
"The difference between a good architect and a great one is that the good architect gives in to every temptation and the great one does not."
"As architects, we’re obsessed with aesthetics, with creating buildings that are pleasing to the eye. But if we accept that the real function of architecture is to help people resist temptation, then perhaps architecture isn’t really about buildings at all."
"Isn’t the real function of architecture to make such a thing impossible? To punish the perpetrator, heal the victim, change the future? As architects, why should we stop at our buildings’ walls?"
"But I see now that our future lies not in building beautiful havens from the ugliness in society, but in building a different kind of society."
"What you experienced when you walked through the front door—into a small, almost claustrophobic hallway, before entering the flowing spaces of the house itself—is a classic architectural device of compression and release."
"You probably aren’t aware of it, but you’re currently swimming in a complex soup of ultrasonics—mood-enhancing waveforms."
"That technology is only in its infancy, but it has far-reaching implications."
"I’ve been changed by you, I say. And I don’t think even you can have sex with an entire town."
"An ordinary tent or house can be bought off with an animal, or a rich man’s house with a slave; but a sacred structure such as a temple or a bridge needs a sacrifice of special worth and importance."
"In many societies, notably in the Far East, the dead are marked with a building constructed in their honor—a practice not so very different, perhaps, from the naming of a Carnegie Hall or a Rockefeller Plaza after some noted philanthropist."
"Emma had low self-esteem that was lowered still further when she was sexually assaulted. Like many rape victims, she blamed herself—quite wrongly of course."
"The need for absolute control is another kind of ill treatment."
"Sometimes, yes. But it’s a painful and difficult process, even with the help of a good therapist. And it’s narcissistic to believe that we’re going to be the one to change another person’s fundamental nature. The only person you can ever really change is yourself."
"It’s hard to concentrate. I can’t stop thinking about the fact he spoke the exact same words to Emma as he did to me."
"The only sound is the soft scratch of Edward’s pencil as he sketches me."
"Knowing Edward finds it hard to sleep if I use the bathroom after him, in case a towel has been left haphazardly on the floor, I spread them out after every shower and come back to deal with them when they’re dry."
"He has a leather-bound notebook he carries at all times, along with a steel Rotring propelling pencil, as heavy as a bullet. Sketching is what he does to relax."
"I’m becoming a little bit obsessed with you, Emma."
"It’s with the man who designed the house—One Folgate Street. He’s a breath of fresh air after Simon, to be honest."
"I was frightened of telling Simon. He’s violent sometimes."
"It’s people who are angry with me, not the house."
"I stopped being anorexic, but I did stay thin. People liked that, I discovered."
"We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything."
"No one offers me a seat, not that I’d really expect them to yet—but a woman with an eight-month-sized bump and a BABY ON BOARD pin gets on at Kings Cross and somebody stands up for her."
"It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men."
"I no longer feel quite so contemptuous of him. Now there’s a part of me that remembers how nice it felt to be forgiven."
"I have to change. I have to start being someone who sees things clearly. Not a victim."
"You have to get to that place by yourself and recognize it for what it is and then, only then, do you have a chance of turning things around."
"But now I know your worst secrets and you know mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? For us to be completely honest with each other?"
"Everyone and everything. But for the first time since I started this, I get knocked back. The answer comes back swiftly, but it’s a no."
"I was wrong, I say desperately. But think what you did. How much worse was that?"
"I will always grieve for you. But now there will be another to love, and can there really be such an inexhaustible store of love in me that my feelings for Isabel remain undimmed?"
"I told Mark I deleted it when I moved out, he says. But I didn’t. Then I used it to hack the system here. It was easy. A child could have done it."
"I’ve been upstairs, he says. In the attic. I come in after you’re asleep sometimes and sleep up there. So I can be near you."
"Why? he repeats. Why? That’s what I keep asking myself, Em. Why Monkford? Why Saul? Why any of them? When none of them loved you the way I did. And you loved me back. I know you did. We were happy."
"Everyone has problems, don’t they? It’s the hormones, they make me weep at anything right now."
"You’re in breach of at least a dozen restrictive covenants. I think you’ll find we can."
"Love is always one-sided, Jane," he says sadly.
"When you’ve lost the center of your universe, there’s only one thing that can possibly make you whole again."
"Who knows better than me what it’s like to lose a child? How you’ll do anything, however destructive or wrong, that seems to numb the pain?"