Bright Young Women

“They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.”

“Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.”

“Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it's a messy one at that.”

“Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.”

“There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to the defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”

“I've tried to make sense of how someone who didn't stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that's it, the thing they all had in common - a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he's looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us - we are the ones who remind him that he's not that smart, not that good-looking, and there's nothing particularly special about him.”

“anger in women is treated as a character disorder, as a problem to be solved, when oftentimes it is entirely appropriate, given the circumstances that trigger it.”

“I have faith, because nature is the very best example of integration. Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”

“Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.”

“life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.”

“Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”

“Give me twenty minutes alone in a room with him,” Brian agreed, in a ravenous, juicy way that churned my stomach. This became something of a Rorschach test over the years. There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn’t so big a difference between the man who’d brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”

“Old souls are just people who had to fend for themselves ahead of their time.”

“The truth is something people will go to great lengths to keep for themselves. It shouldn't feel like a gift when you get it, but it is.”

“I should be prettier or less, depending on who was looking and when.”

“The Defendant did not like to be told what to do and when to do it and once jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn’t get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment. For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention”

“But mostly, I continue to be drawn to mediation because I know better than anyone that All-American Sex Killers are not born, that they come from broken and battered homes, human systems that fail them well before they reach the penal ones, and then they go out into a world that tells them that women are deserving depositories for their impotence and rage.”

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”

“Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it's a messy one, at that.”

“women who wish to advance in their career face an insidious kind of discrimination, one that is not active, in-your-face sexism but, rather, no response at all. It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.”

“There was something about Denise’s excitement for a future she would never get to experience that made me murderous with grief. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone coming into her room and pitying her, or, worse, judging her for having the audacity to make plans when she should have known God would laugh. That was a real thing people said down here, but fuck God for laughing and fuck Cosmopolitan too.”

“We had been performing the same dance all our lives—one in which I asked for little and received even less”

“the most effective response to any argument is the question How do you know? Shift the burden of proof to your opponent and force them to back up their position with mountains of evidence.”

“But still I loved her. Still I wanted her to have the big, swaggering life she was destined to have, though I had come to accept it would likely not involve me.”

“Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time.”

“The Defendant flaunted his true nature with audacious displays of ineptitude time and time again, and I wanted to tell these girls, I wanted to tell everyone in that Starbucks, that they should be irate that effort and money had gone into dusting off the story and telling it again for a new generation, only for the filmmaker to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines forty years ago.”

“The haunted look on my father’s face as he recalled that night taught me a formative lesson. Other people’s pain mattered more than my own discomfort.”

“Hell, I’ll take him,” the driver said. “Give me fifteen minutes with the son of a bitch.” I stared at the back of his head in utter disbelief. Was there some sort of script men were instructed to follow in these kinds of situations? It was exactly the language Brian and Mr. McCall had used over dinner at the mansion in Red Hills.”

“I don’t have a problem pitying rich people. There are a lot of sad things in this world, and getting everything you want only to realize you are still empty inside is certainly one of them.”

“There are rituals around dying. They’re not for the dead, they’re for those of us who are left behind.”