|
c709555
|
For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-ey..
|
|
human
derivative
secondhand-experience
seen-it-all
real
personality-traits
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
26a733d
|
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.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
00c2e17
|
I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love sh..
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
a9c510c
|
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.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
390dd81
|
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.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
1bd23bc
|
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. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
834dd95
|
See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
c011bee
|
How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
c7e0d52
|
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. 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, because Cool Girls are above all ho..
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
87200fd
|
I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.
|
|
sobriety
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
f37408f
|
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.
|
|
family-relationships
trust
family
love
sibling-bond
sibling-relationships
unconditional-love
sister
brothers
siblings
family-love
twins
sisters
loyalty
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
f9bd7c1
|
I never knew I was capable of being ridiculous over a man. It's a relief.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
ea865d4
|
I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
14d8303
|
I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize I am more type A than Nick, and I try not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn't see that ..
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
4300ae5
|
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."
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
a29943c
|
Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
b4dafe9
|
You think you know the answer, you're going to find peace? Like knowing is somehow going to fix you? You think after what happened there's any peace for you, sweetheart? How about this. Instead of asking yourself what happened, just accept that it happened.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
44551d4
|
I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn't perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn't fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn't perfect.
|
|
friends
friendship
lack-of-understanding
lacking
gillian-flynn
breakups
drama-queen
control
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
d6b6ce0
|
Wear this, don't wear that. Do this chore now and do this chore when you get a chance and by that I mean now. And definitely, definitely give up the things you love fro me, so I will have proof that you love me best. It's the female pissing contest -- as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response be..
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
0b343a5
|
Americans like what is easy, and it's easy to like pregnant women - they're like ducklings or bunnies or dogs. Still, it baffles me that these self-righteous, self-enthralled waddlers get such special treatment. As if it's so hard to spread your legs and let a man ejaculate between them.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
256daa2
|
Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
661391a
|
I don't have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I've earned that.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
67d6075
|
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.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
f421313
|
I'm in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. 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?
|
|
relationships
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
534f5d1
|
I was the embodiment of every writer's worst fear: a cliche.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
79639c2
|
It's a very female thing, isn't it, to take one boys' night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
420d206
|
I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless..
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
e9aea09
|
You don't ever want to be the wife who keeps her husband from playing poker - you don't ever want to be the shrew with the curlers and the rolling pin. So you swallow your disappointment and say okay.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
cfdc3bb
|
And sometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices--and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be , I find offensive.
|
|
feminism
sexual-discrimination
offense
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
74c7bb6
|
He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
7df4551
|
I'm not someone who can be depended one five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don't even get out of bed five days in a row-I often don't remember to eat five days in a row. Reporting to a workplace, where I should need to stay for eight hours-eight big hours outside my home- was unfeasible.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
7d75fc7
|
Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don't have to worry about life anymore.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
ff14630
|
Marriage is compromise and hard work,and then more hard work and communication and compromise. And then work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
47e616d
|
Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.
|
|
marriage
loss
heartbreak
love
communicate
newlyweds
marriage-advice
divorce
compromise
anger
communication
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
9aa7c2d
|
Books may be temporary; dicks are forever.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
1d03fef
|
Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them," Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. "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."
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
23c7e84
|
I'm here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I'm panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I'd be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
b66cc26
|
He has a great smile, a cat's smile. He should cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at me.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
40e9e54
|
Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
4d7090d
|
The Days were a clan that mighta lived long But Ben Day's head got screwed on wrong That boy craved dark Satan's power So he killed his family in one nasty hour Little Michelle he strangled in the night Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight Mother Patty he saved for last Blew off her head with a shotgun blast Baby Libby somehow survived But to live through that ain't much a life --SCHOOLYARD RHYME, CIRCA 1985
|
|
rhyme
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
9592e1e
|
I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
|
|
words
truth
dick
judging-by-appearance
jumping-to-conclusions
outer-appearance
what-s-inside-that-counts
stoic
emotional
judging
heartless
mean
control
emotions
panic
judgemental
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
0857c10
|
Committing to Nick, feeling safe with Nick, being happy with Nick, made me realize that there was a Real Amy in there, and she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy. Nick wanted Cool Amy anyway. 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 start..
|
|
marriage
committment
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
c242747
|
I'm tired of dying.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |
|
07d5d96
|
I've suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.
|
|
|
Gillian Flynn |