Quotes from Gillian Flynn

Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that's how the hating first began. I've thought about this a lot, and that's where it started, I think.

I'm the bitch who makes you a man.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple.

There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die.

Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

There was nothing I wanted to do more than be unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away. I was raw. I felt swollen with potential tears, like a water balloon filled to burst. Begging for a pin prick.

Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

All this time I'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.

I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. (2)

He could cheat on me and he would never tell me, and he would think less and less of me for not figuring it out. He would see me across the breakfast table, innocently slurping cereal, and know that I am a fool, and how can anyone respect a fool?

I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

He did apologize profusely. (Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess.)

This is the unforgiving light of the morning, time to drop the illusion.

I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone.

Sometimes it is all too loud.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and f*ing figure it out for yourself because everyone's overworked and understaffed.

People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.

The question I've asked more often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I supposed these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking how are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman's body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth.

How do you know you're not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: 'I like strong women.' If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because 'I like strong women' is code for: 'I hate strong women.