Manhunt 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

“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

“That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent.”
― 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

“It's the fucking chromosome crusaders.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Nobody ever got anything from a boss by asking nicely,”
― 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

“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

“They’ll win, and they won’t even like it.”
― 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

“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

“New Moon. The Mormon lady’s vampire story.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Nervous, knowing something bad was coming, but happy, too, because being hit was so much better than being afraid. Once it happened it was over, no more anxious worry, and sooner or later he’d cry with his face in her lap and tell her how much he loved her and say how her mother would see the bruises and get nosy, how he feared she’d go gossiping and poison everyone against him, and she would stroke his hair and shush him gently, promising she wouldn’t, feeling like a god as she held his whole life in her hands.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Maine”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“How many times had he turned away from the unease he felt at seeing these wan, starving people in their shabby tents, telling himself there was nothing he could do, that he was just one person in a larger system, the same way he’d watched Ferguson and Standing Rock and thought, Well, what can I do?”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Nobody ever got anything from a boss by asking nicely,” she said softly. “Someone has the power to make things better and they keep not doing that, sooner or later all that’s left to do is put two in the back of the greedy bitch’s head. Shit, you’re an Indian, right? You know what happens when you wait for the people holding the whip to grow a heart, or you listen to the nice white people who coordinate their protests with the cops.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“New men, she thought, gripping the gutter bracing a foot against the wall. Like Coke Zero. Same great vicious disregard for our lives, none of the socially enforced restraint!”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Laconia”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“It made him think of his last summer on the farm and, for some reason, of the night his grandfather, uneasy, not understanding, but with love, had shaved his head at his request with a pair of ancient clippers. If that’s what you want, tiger.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Make me a man, Lord. Take my body and burn away the parts that are wrong. Burn them out of me. I don’t care if it hurts. Make me a man. Make me a man. Make me a man.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt