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“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

“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

“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

“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, so cocooned, 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

“I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.”
― 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 don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emmaâ€�'

'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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“That feeling I used to have of playing to an invisible audience has been replaced by the consciousness, the ever-presence, of Edward's discerning eye; a sense that the house and I are now part of one indivisible mise-en-scène. I feel my life becoming more considered, more beautiful, knowing that he considers it. But for that very reason, it becomes increasingly hard to engage with the world beyond these walls, the world where chaos and ugliness reign.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“You say just, Ellis says flatly. There is no just with Edward Monkford. Nothing's more important to him than getting his own way.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“It's the sketch Edward did of me before he went away, the one he said was fine but didn't want to keep. It's as if he's drawn me not once but twice. In the main drawing I have my head turned to the right. It's so detailed, you can see the tautness of my neck muscles and the arch of my clavicle. But underneath or over that there's a second drawing, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, done with a surprising energy and violence: my head turned the other way, my mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions give the drawing a disturbing sense of movement.

Which one's the pentimento, and which the finished thing? And why did Edward say there was nothing wrong with it? Did he not want me to see this double image for some reason?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I loved Emma.' The words, so flat and final, explode into the air. 'But she lied to me. I thought perhaps I could have the love without the lies. With you, I mean. Do you remember your application letter? How you talked about integrity and honesty and trust? That was what made me think it might work, that it might be better this time. But I've never loved you the way I loved her.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But don't you see, I say, I don't care. I don't care what you've done or how bad you are. Edward, we belong together. We both know it. Now I know your worst secrets and you know mine. Isn't that what you've always wanted? For us to be completely honest with each other?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“All these men who loved Emma, I think. For all her problems, men were fixated on her. Will anyone ever feel like that about me?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Love flows from me into him, and his blue eyes crinkle, huge and happy. Such a smiley baby. The midwife says it can't be a real smile, not yet, just some passing gas or a random quiver of his lip, but I know she's wrong.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“As he walks me back to my room, I begin to realize that good and bad are relative terms, and that my world, for now, is a constant shade of gray.”
― Rena Olsen

“It's what I feel that I'm struggling to process. So many emotions, so overwhelming, that they almost cancel one another out, leaving me clear-headed by numb.'- Jane, pg 241”
― JP Delaney