Gillian Flynn

“Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life--in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.”

“I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.”

“I am a great husband because I am very afraid she may kill me.”

“My twin, Go. I've said this phrase so many times, it has become a reassuring mantra instead of actual words: Mytwingo. We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves. We even have a dash of twin telepathy. Go is truly the one person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don't feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don't clarify, I don't doubt, I don't worry. I don't tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can. We spent nine months back to back, covering each other. It became a lifelong habit. It never mattered to me that she was a girl, strange for a deeply self-conscious kid. What can I say? She was always just cool.”

“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 miles of weak piss.”

“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.”

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

“I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm. I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations- bulkily, unnaturally- just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don't care. I balance his checkbook, I trim his hair. I've gotten so retro, at one point I will probably use the word pocketbook, shuffling out the door in my swingy tweed coat, my lips red, on the way to the beauty parlor. Nothing bothers me. Everything seems like it will turn out fine, every bother transformed into an amusing story to be told over dinner. 'So I killed a hobo today, honey...hahahaha! Ah, we have fun”

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

“I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.”

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

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

“How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?”

“Sometimes it is all too loud.”

“A town so small, you tripped over people you hated every day.”

“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?”

“If she's sad or upset or angry, she needs to be alone-she fears a man dismissing her womanly tears.”

“I never knew I was capable of being ridiculous over a man. It's a relief.”

“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.”

“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.) And yet: Don't land me in one of those relationships where we're always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and "playfully" scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about.”

“It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.”

“Daydreams can be dangerous.”

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

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

“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.”

“Safer to be feared than loved.”

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

“I was never really on my side in any argument. I liked the Old Testament spitefulness of the phrase got what she deserved. Sometimes women do.”

“I'm tired of dying.”

“See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

“Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.”

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

“Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.”

“Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.”

“I've had the blues for twenty-four years.”

“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 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.”

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

“I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”

“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.”

“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)”

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”