Gretchen Felker-Martin > Quotes

“It was actually good that the world had ended, because now no one could make her play Settlers of Catan.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Even here, at the gates of hell … dyke drama reigns supreme.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about black people in monthly book clubs the way you’d read about the construction of London’s sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a kind of boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“I know the world's dead, but that means we get more of a say in what happens to the people left in it, not less.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Sometimes you just have to live with that,” said Robbie. “Someone’s hurt, you don’t know what you did, and that’s … it. That’s all there is. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“The more she thought about it, imagining those soft lips opening around her tongue, those long lashes fluttering in dreamy anticipation, the more she realized that no specific moment, no single touch, was to blame. What mattered was that she’d broken the silent rule. She’d touched a girl before the girl touched her, had laid her violent hands on tender skin. She should have known better. Self-pity pressed against her mouth and nostrils like a sodden rag. I’m a girl until a real one decides I’m not.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“It's the fucking chromosome crusaders.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Later, she thought, in a moment of terrible clarity, each of us will tell herself the other was the one who pulled the trigger.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Leah’s heart ached. She wanted to go to them. She wanted to hold them. She wanted to tell them how disgusting they were being, how weak, how unlovable. She wanted to look away and never think about their expressions of awful, broken need again.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Dreadnought

“She wanted to die. No. Not really, she didn’t. That was just the beer and gin and crème de menthe talking, their liquid voices sloshing up from the depths of her uneasy stomach. What she really wanted was to already be dead.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“They remember, and men know it, and if you can’t rape a woman, if you can’t kill her, slap her, shout over her every word, then you have to face her, and you have to face the things you’ve done.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“You always could have done something, he thought as the van bounced over the speed bump at the motor pool’s threshold and passed through a loose clump of gate guards in full riot gear, faces smudged with soot, blood drying on their plastic shields. You were just afraid to be uncomfortable.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“It was funny, she thought, that people treated her flesh like a public resource, a reservoir for all their insecurities and emotional dysfunction, when it was she who had their insides at her fingertips.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“In some ways it made it easier, focusing solely on the technical problem at hand. She didn’t have to think about the snotty little child empress she was doing it for, or the people starving in the camp outside the blast gate. There are people starving everywhere, she told herself sometimes, when guilt crept close as she lay on her memory-foam mattress, cool filtered air blowing over her, the taste of butter lingering on her tongue.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Each of us will tell herself, the other one's who pulled the trigger.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“An eagle swooped low over the field, passing by not far from him, and he wished, with the same terrible, helpless fury with which he had once wished to sleep and wake up as a boy, to shuck his skin and leap after it into the sky, to be wild and alone and friendless. Free.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“The women who looked at each other in a way Beth didn’t understand, a way sealed forever within the cold and rigid bounds of cisness but which nonetheless told her without room for doubt that they couldn’t leave too soon. That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Trannies, your families will never love you. You are living a lie & you know it. End your miserable existence. Commit suicide now. —Unknown troll”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Nobody ever got anything from a boss by asking nicely,”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“They’ll win, and they won’t even like it.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and she let him hold her close among the falling leaves and relished the illusion that, if only for a little while, she was safe.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“She kissed the pink bud of Sophie's clit and imagined sucking it out of its hood of tender skin, drawing it like a snail from its shell up into her own body where it might take root and change, drawing her cock up into her flesh, parting the soft curtains of her sex. She drank from Sophie. Greedy mouth on fluttered lips. The dream of a cunt growing like a seedling in strange soil.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“If he'd spent his time preparing for anything since the end of the world, shooting a bunch of screaming cis idiots was it.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“She’d eaten more balls than she’d ever sucked cocks.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“No one wanted to buy bags full of ballsacks from unshowered transsexuals”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“When did I become a person the quality of whose days is determined by whether she eats balls raw or fried?”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“But I think mostly I just wanted her to … make me real, the way you’re real when the beautiful people look at you, and talk to you, and let you fuck them.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Cheryl, face twisted into a lined rictus, crawling roachlike through the garden on all fours.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Cuckoo