1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Emma Cline

Emma Cline Quotes

Total quotes: 17
“Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“There would be no heroics, I understood. Just the dull terror, the physical pain that would have to be suffered through”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“Marion smiled at him with an intensity that made her look almost cruel. I tried to smile that same way.”
— Emma Cline, Marion
Tagged: Womanhood, sexual attraction, Lust, Love, Relationships, coming of age
“Getting people to look at you, I understood, was a way of getting things to happen.”
— Emma Cline, See Me
Tagged: Life, Womanhood, feminism, coming of age
“I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls. 
I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
“I’ll never be able to get back the years I’ve now spent responding to an ex-boyfriend’s baseless legal assaults … instead of writing another book. That’s a loss I don’t know how to fully comprehend.”
— Emma Cline, Emma Cline was a literary darling, then a target. With 'Daddy,' she takes aim
Tagged: Emma Cline, Reading, Books, Daddy, The Girls
“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law. We were drifting through whole weeks, making bonfires at night, eating twenty popsicles in a row and burying the flimsy plastic wrappers all over the yard.”
— Emma Cline, Marion
Tagged: Womanhood, sexual attraction, Lust, Love, Relationships, coming of age
“the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“I squeezed lemon juice on my hair until it was crisp and sticky, and then I sat in the sun, hoping my hair would lighten to her shade of pale. I studied her face for signs of my own, noting her polyester miniskirts, the slim legs in tall boots.”
— Emma Cline, See Me
Tagged: Life, Womanhood, feminism, coming of age
“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
Tagged: Girls, Growing Up, Womanhood, strength, feminism, Life, coming of age, thriller
“They didn't have very far to fall--I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that would comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was.”
— Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel
loading next page...