Megan Abbott Quotes

I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.

I have nightmares that I'm going to wake up, and everyone's driving a Prius and living in a condo, and we're all getting health insurance.

I'm from Long Island, which is a very cookie-cutter place.

Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

I had turned into a trophy wife - and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections.

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.

Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded.

I understand the all black or all white look (to be perfectly blunt, it's easy and you don't have to think about it very much) but would any of us really want to be one of those people?

There is no sin worse in life than being boring and nothing worse than letting other people tell you what to do.

one day in the country is exactly like another.

Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside.

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.

If I were well behaved, I'd die of boredom.

The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.

As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers

One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have changed the order and no one would have noticed.

A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.