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72ed02b
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I liked the Old Testament spitefulness of the phrase got what she deserved. Sometimes women do.
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Gillian Flynn |
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3509401
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Amy was absolutely beautiful. I hated her. I was afraid of her.
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Gillian Flynn |
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5ddf9b1
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I've actually felt sad for myself, picturing my slim, naked, pale body, floating just beneath the current, a colony of snails attached to one bare leg, my hair trailing like seaweed until I reach the ocean and drift down down down to the bottom, my waterlogged flesh peeling off in soft streaks, me slowly disappearing into the current like a watercolor until just the bones are left.
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Gillian Flynn |
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4958d35
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I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.
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Gillian Flynn |
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a9dbf23
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I worry for a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal. I'm too self-conscious otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I'm obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make u for the fake charm, and then I've basically turned into Liza Minelli: I'm dancing in tights and sequins..
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Gillian Flynn |
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cb9f53f
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I know it's a guy who will talk to me, he wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better. He is the kind of guy who carries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually fuck me properly. I would like to be fucked properly! My dating life seems to rotate around three types of me: preppy Ivy Leaguers who believe they're characters in a Fitzgerald novel; slick Wall Streeters with money si..
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Gillian Flynn |
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26af9ec
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His nametag said Jose. I tried to see if he was missing any fingers. Mexicans don't get cushy box jobs unless they're owed. That's the way plants down here work: The Mexicans get the shittiest, most dangerous jobs, and the whites still complain.
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Gillian Flynn |
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8093dcf
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Vickery, a slim fellow in his early fifties, had already sweated through his uniform. His shirt clung to his chest, and his pants puckered out in back where an ass should have been.
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Gillian Flynn |
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7e73cf8
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We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.
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Gillian Flynn |
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ece33fc
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Just got to keep on keeping on,
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Gillian Flynn |
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a2a92e8
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If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. 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.
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Gillian Flynn |
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a5d6919
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The one thing I suspected about Jim Jeffreys was that he must be Christian, churchy - he had the patience and optimism of someone who thought Jesus was watching.
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Gillian Flynn |
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ab7412d
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trendy, my
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Gillian Flynn |
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8f039e1
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I'm not one of those reporters who relishes picking through people's privacy. It's probably the reason I'm a second-rate journalist.
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Gillian Flynn |
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9e7ba7e
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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."
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Gillian Flynn |
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697fb4f
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Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood. Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION
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Gillian Flynn |
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695c15f
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I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because--unlike Manhattanites--they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles.
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Gillian Flynn |
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4dd7084
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He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room.
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Gillian Flynn |
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99fcd5e
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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..
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Gillian Flynn |
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cbf466f
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You think you can ever be a normal man again? You'll find a nice girl, and you'll still think of me, and you'll be so completely dissatisfied, trapped in your boring, normal life with your regular wife and your two average kids. You'll think of me and then you'll look at your wife, and you'll think: Dumb bitch.
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Gillian Flynn |
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0108b9f
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And she'd feel sorry for the kids, but not in a way that made her want to help, just in a way that made her not want to look at them anymore.
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Gillian Flynn |
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bff1aaf
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Nick's cell phone rings at ten A.M., and I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to sound with me. He heads into the bedroom and shuts
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Gillian Flynn |
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d960753
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never entirely erased the stink, though--she must have one rank pussy),
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Gillian Flynn |
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743ed37
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Once you've crossed state lines, you don't phone to ask if you can drop in.
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Gillian Flynn |
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237f112
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If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we'd all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that's why someone had invented a saying like that. So we'd all know that we'd never have what we needed.
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Gillian Flynn |
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64859cb
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This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
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Gillian Flynn |
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ef7d944
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This is Nick's wife, Amy, who was born and raised in New York City." And her friends, plump and welcoming, immediately suffer some strange Tourettesian episode: They repeat the words--New York City!--with clasped hands and say something that defies response: That must have been neat. Or, in reedy voices, they sing "New York, New York," rocking side to side with tiny jazz hands. Maureen's friend from the shoe store, Barb, drawls "Nue York Ce..
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Gillian Flynn |
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943891e
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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 playing-acting there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because i'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to fe..
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Gillian Flynn |
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beabd7b
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She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out--a folk song? a lullabye?--and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
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Gillian Flynn |
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3da9012
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So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn't make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I'm the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-lookin..
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Gillian Flynn |
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bd3dd9f
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My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement,
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Gillian Flynn |
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3eca8e4
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It was him. The boy in 'I met a boy!
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Gillian Flynn |
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a424bc7
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They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing. People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.
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Gillian Flynn |
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10276a1
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The woman got shit done, and she was not one to abandon a project (say, her fixer-upper husband, for instance), even if she decided she didn't like it.
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Gillian Flynn |
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5270c50
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I was not raised by big-dreamer parents who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort.
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Gillian Flynn |
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403e022
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My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all.
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Gillian Flynn |
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7b6b548
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It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
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Gillian Flynn |
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f83026b
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Instead there were paintings of sailboats, proper pastel pastorals, a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I'd known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough. Given my druthers now, I'd prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding's wife, "the Duchess," who recorded the smallest offenses in a little red notebook and avenged herself accordingly. Today I like my ..
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Gillian Flynn |
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0f69451
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It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm. I doubt my sister will ever marry: If she's sad or upset or angry, she needs to be alone - she fears a man dismissing her womanly tears.
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Gillian Flynn |
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a25550f
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It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative 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-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoe..
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Gillian Flynn |
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e0499b0
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If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up.
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Gillian Flynn |
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7106fa2
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Mama Mo does not insist. She simply makes things a reality by assuming they are such:
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Gillian Flynn |
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111f6d2
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I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was.
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Gillian Flynn |
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680ee94
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He'd have to work to make me comfortable here, and he doesn't want to do that. He wants to enjoy himself.
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Gillian Flynn |