Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn

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

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

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

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.)

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.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra.

they were three advanced people with three advanced degrees in psychology—they thought more before nine A.M. than most people thought all month.

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.

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco.

A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.

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.

Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn’t handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and average-ness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. I had pretended to be one kind of man and revealed myself to be quite another. Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.

The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities.

I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why. I would sit there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun.

He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.

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. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.

crank the shank, clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.