Quotes from Gillian Flynn

All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it's so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine.

I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music.

He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool.

How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing.

The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotion. Extra space is always good.

I was already tired of talking, and I'd said very little.

My thank-yous always come out rather labored. I often don't give them at all. People do what they're supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation -- they're like frozen-yogurt employees who put out cups for tips.

Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails.

Smile, it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.

I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again.

my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.

If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we'd all have a very Merry Christmas

To know exactly what I wanted to hear in those notes, to woo me back to her, even to predict all my wrong moves … the woman knew me cold. Better than anyone in the world, she knew me. All this time I'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood.

Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.

She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did.

Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them. Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you're making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don't go crazy.

Nothing to it but to do it.

You're so hateful. - I learned at your feet.

because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.

It's an insane, insane crime, a lot of it isn't going to make sense. That's why people are so obsessed with these murders. If they made any sense, they wouldn't really be mysteries, right?

I take a giant breath, roll my anger up into a red rubber ball, and mentally kick it out into space.

Right now, she had an almost obsessive need to get home, nest up, feel safe.

My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past..

I was not that man: I didn't hate and fear all women. I was a one-woman misogynist. If I despised only Amy, focused all my fury and rage and venom on the one woman who deserved it, that didn't make me my father. That made me sane.