The Girl Before Quotes

“One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Never apologise for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I have no time for people who don’t strive to better themselves.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“That was Emma—she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I realize something. I haven't had a single flashback or panic attack since I stepped inside the house. It's so cut off from the outside world, sococooned,I feel utterly safe. A line from my favorite movie floats into my head.The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma—'

'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you’ve been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Oh, hasn't he told you? The ones before. None of them last, you see. That's the whole point.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“The same goes for Edward Monkford. Yes, based on what you've told me, it seems Emma was the real narcissist, not him. But there's no doubting he's an extreme controller. What happens when a controller comes up against someone who's out of control? The combination could be explosive.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“He was heartbroken, I say.

Heartbroken, he repeats. Of course. That's the great myth Edward Monkford's spun around himself, isn't it? The tormented genius who lost the love of his life and became an arch-minimalist as a result.

You don't think that's right?

I know it isn't.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I'll tell you something thatwasunusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I know it must look odd, given that I didn't even know Emma. But it seems to me that almost no one really knew her. Everyone I speak to has a different version of what she was like.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Most people put all their energies into trying to change other people when the only person you can really change is yourself, and even that's incredibly difficult.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“If I’d been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I’d never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it’s important, I find myself wondering if I can’t just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin. Maybe”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat. And”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever's been written on them before. Perhaps this will be your chance for a brand-new slate”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re still messed up inside. And that’s all anyone’s looking for really, isn’t it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But the clinical term for that kind of pathological lying is pseudologia fantastica. It’s associated with low self-esteem, attention-seeking, and a deep-seated desire to present yourself in a more favorable light.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before