Sharp Objects

"I am learning to be cared for. I am learning to be parented. I'm returning to my childhood, the scene of the crime."

"A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort."

"Hurt as a form of flirtation. Pain as intimacy, like my mother jabbing her tweezers into my wounds."

"I didn't need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I was."

"Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed."

"It was a town that bred complacency through cable TV and a convenience store. Those who remained here were still just as segregated as before... They were women not strong enough or smart enough to leave. Women without imagination. So they stayed in Wind Gap and played their teenage lives on an endless loop."

"I never mind throwing up. When I'd get sick as a child, I remember my mother holding my hair back, her voice soothing: Get all that bad stuff out, sweetheart. Don't stop till it's all out. Turns out I like that retching and weakness and spit."

"I was never really on my side in any argument. I liked the Old Testament spitefulness of the phrase got what she deserved. Sometimes women do."

"People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of New. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was."

"I wanted to slice barren into my skin. That's how I'd stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal."

"I like checking days off a calendar—151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn't ruined. 153 and I haven't destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me. Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand."

"I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters."

"I've always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication—a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head."

"...in truth I think she's always had more problems with children than she'd ever admit. I think, in fact, she hates them. There's a jealousy, a resentfulness that I can feel even now, in my memory. At one point, she probably liked the idea of a daughter. When she was a girl, I bet she daydreamed of being a mother, of coddling, of licking her child like a milk-swelled cat. She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them."

"I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me."

"I'm here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I'm panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I'd be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me."

"I felt no particular allegiance to the town. This was the place my sister died, the place I started cutting myself. A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark."

"I was lovely to look at, as long as I was fully clothed. Had things turned out differently, I might have abused myself with a series of heart-wrenched lovers. I might have dallied with brilliant men. I might have married."

"... children digest terror differently. The boy saw a horror, and that horror became the wicked witch of fairy tales, the cruel snow queen."

"Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings."

"'I wish I'd be murdered... Then I'd never have to worry again. When you die, you become perfect. I'd be like Princess Diana."

"They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss."

"For those who need a name, there’s a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you’re going to the doctor, and I’ll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you’ve fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn’t necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes—bad, cry—like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in."