Gillian Flynn citations

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

“Amy's basically exploiting the sociopath's most reliable maxim. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”

“Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”

“People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.”

“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?'

He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you.

But he said, 'Because I feel sorry for you.'

'Why?'

'Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

“My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.”

“I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.”

“I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.”

“Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.”

“It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.”

“I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.”

“Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)”

“She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.”

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.”

“Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”

“We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”

“People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.”

“Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer.”

“The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.”

“It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were okay, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that simply wasn't so”

“Problems always start long before you really, really see them.”

“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”