I Have Some Questions For You Quotes
"Sometimes they know her right away. Sometimes they ask, 'Wasn’t that the one where the guy kept her in the basement?' No! No. It was not."
"What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl."
"The bystander, the voyeur, even the perpetrator—they’re all off the hook when the girl was born dead."
"So there was the money, and the guy, and my ego, and—below it all, a note too low to hear—there was Thalia, there was the way that ever since I’d watched that video, I’d felt just slightly misaligned."
"When all the leaves fell that first November, I expected to see the houses and buildings that had been waiting, all along, through the trees. But no: Beyond these bare branches, more bare branches. Beyond them, only more."
"I cared about details. Not because they were something I could control, but because they were something I could own."
"The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia."
"It was the feeling I still got when I walked into a suburban shopping mall, despite it being decades since groups of teenagers roved the food courts looking for people to ridicule. I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head."
"I see so much fetishizing, and I don’t want to be another white girl giggling about murder."
"Thalia’s question seemed not just for the person offstage, but for me: What? What’s your problem? Why are you back here? What’s bothering you so much? Why now? What? What? What?"
"The truth was in there, but you had to dig."
"One loss wasn't worse than the other, but it was the second that did us in."
"Something was off. At first I thought she was sleepwalking, and then I’m like, it’s eight thirty p.m. I wondered if she was on drugs. I mean, something serious. Something that made the world not totally real."
"She knows if she gets in slowly it’ll be too cold; she’ll chicken out. So she climbs to the observation deck, because if she can fly in—and she’s seen people do it, knows it can be done—she’ll be irrevocably in the water."
"Have you ever lost something somewhere, a book or a necklace, and you—it feels like you left an arm back there, or an ear?"
"Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it."
"Sometimes—it’s Occam’s razor, right? The guy who was stalking her is the one who killed her."
"But is it such a bad thing? You know when the time was to pretend not to care? Adolescence. That’s when I had the energy to pretend I didn’t care."
"Age is not the only form of power. You could argue that working for the gallery, Jasmine had as much career power over him as he had over her."
"The ruling class of Granby ought to have grown into the entitled ignoramuses who ruled the country, the ones whose influence outstripped their intelligence."
"It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be."
"It might have been about power, it might have been about sex, it might have been about control, it might even—in some broken part of you—have been something warped but paternal, something tender and blind. But it was not about love."
"I imagined that if New Hampshire suddenly thawed, I’d find my own lost things in the melt. I’d find the calculator I lost junior year and had to use all my babysitting money to replace."
"Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess."
"You’ve had to live with yourself for a quarter century."
"When you’re eighteen, a month is a few years."
"The inside of the door offered up not only blood spatter but also the long-invisible print, low down, of a bloody sneaker toe."
"The hell of imprisonment isn’t the terrible food, it’s the lack of choice of food."
"We’ll never feel we have justice unless someone confesses."
"The wheels of justice came off the wagon a long time ago."
"It mattered to me, because I could still feel Peewee Walcott's fingers digging into my right breast."
"But this middle phase, these deaths of people in their early forties, felt the cruelest."
"Most killers aren't Agatha Christie villains."
"I figured you were the one person who could do something. You’re not Granby, you’re not the courts, you’re not a witness, you’re not the police. You’re allowed to tell the truth."
"The issue is they barely looked at anyone. They picked a guy, they said he did it, and they put their blinders on."
"Every moment of that place was a nightmare."
"Justice was served. He got his day in court, he got it again on appeal. I understand the right to a fair trial, but three trials? Four? Five? Where does it end?"
"I’d believed for so many years that it was Omar, that it was settled..."
"The image I kept returning to was of a tangled necklace chain."
"What I knew was that we’d found a gap in the knot. I didn’t know what else it would loosen up..."
"It’s hard to break that pattern of what your parents want..."
"I have never once, in my life, gone after a man who was fully available."
"If you had done the difficult work of adulthood and intervened—what then? Would she have lived?"
"Do you sleep well? Do you dream? Is there forgiveness, in your dreams?"
"Walk into any place like you belong, and you will."
"You know what’s sad, it was one of the things we fought about after she died..."
"I don’t blame you for bringing up his name. None of this is your fault."
"I have a life. I don’t want this to be the first thing that comes up when someone googles my name."
"Maybe I’m coming for you. Maybe I’ve been coming for you all along."
"This was her body, but she’s long gone."
"I can’t think about the lost time because guess what, time doesn’t work backwards anyway. I got what’s in front of me, same as you."