Quotes from Gillian Flynn

in on myself, ignoring my meal, projecting glumness. That was another of my mom's words: glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.

All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind.

Shotgun blasts in a small hallway. The panicked, jaybird cries of my mother, still trying to save her kids with half her head gone.

People do what they're supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation—they're

When you finally stop an itch and realize it's because you've ripped a hole in your skin

I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents—leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind—and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.

What are you doing here?" asked the prettiest. Her flushed face had the roundness of a girl barely in her teens and her hair was parted in ribbons, but her breasts, which she aimed proudly outward, were those of a grown woman. A lucky grown woman.

I thought a lot about killing myself—it's a hobby today

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. Stop

But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can't do it, but I can applaud it in others.

a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade.

I jammed a floppy blue teddy bear under my head, then felt guilty and returned him to the foot of the bed. One should have allegiance to one's childhood things.

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

People judge. Fast

She had an unnecessarily loud voice, a bit of a bray, like some enchanted, hot donkey.

I'd go out each morning and beg for six hours. I knew who to approach and for how long and exactly what to say. I was never ashamed. What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money.

And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted

I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like.

Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.

I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination.

People who get caught get caught because they don't have patience; they refuse to plan.

Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, 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.

Being the cool girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.