Sharp Objects Quotes

“I jammed a floppy blue teddy bear under my head, then felt guilty and returned him to the foot of the bed. One should have allegiance to one's childhood things.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you, my mother used to say whenever I resisted her grooming.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I think she’s sick, and I think what she has is contagious”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“He’s as smooth and shallow as glass.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“The gesture—so random and kind—baffled me. Is this what mothers did, wonder if you might need safety pins? Mine phoned once a month and always asked the same practical questions (grades, classes, upcoming expenses).”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“the grin was gone. Natalie Keene’s lips caved in around her gums in a small circle.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“She began walking away from me, down the hallway—luminous white living rooms and sitting rooms and reading rooms blooming out on all sides—and I studied her. It was the first time we’d seen each other in almost a year. My hair was a different color—brown from red—but she didn’t seem to notice. She looked exactly the same, though, not much older than I am now, although she’s in her late forties. Glowing pale skin,”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“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”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“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. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they?”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“But I felt it now. Something was wrong, right here, very horribly wrong. I could picture Bob Nash sitting on the edge of Ann’s bed, trying to remember the last thing he said to his daughter. I saw Natalie’s mother, crying into one of her old T-shirts. I saw me, a despairing thirteen-year-old sobbing on the floor of my dead sister’s room, holding a small flowered shoe. Or Amma, thirteen herself, a woman-child with a gorgeous body and a gnawing desire to be the baby girl my mother mourned. My mother weeping over Marian. Biting that baby. Amma, asserting her power over lesser creatures, laughing as she and her friends cut through Natalie’s hair, the curls falling to the tile floor. Natalie, stabbing at the eyes of a little girl. My skin was screaming, my ears banged with my heartbeat. I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around myself, and wept.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I had my share of fun,' I said. 'Looks and money get you a long way in Wind Gap.'

'And brains?'

'Brains you hide.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“She had perfect skin, so free of blotches or wrinkles, her face so perfect and character-free she could have just popped out of the womb. They all seemed unfinished. I wanted them to go away.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“My story for the day was a limp sort of evil.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sick and sicker and sickest. What was real and what was fake? Was Amma really sick and needing my mother’s medicine, or was the medicine what was making Amma sick? Did her blue pill make me vomit, or did it keep me from getting more ill than I’d have been without it?”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“violent little girls.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“What a pure way to die.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“It seemed to me that she'd been expelled into this world not quite formed,”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Tears ran down my mother’s cheeks and dripped loudly onto the leather purse she held in her lap. The woman next to her patted her hand. I slipped my notepad from my jacket pocket and began scribbling notes to one side until my mother slapped her hand on mine and hissed, “You are being disrespectful and embarrassing. Stop or I will make you leave.” I quit writing but kept the pad out, feeling stabbingly defiant. But still blushing.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“The X had released its first wave of chemical optimism, I could feel it float up inside me like a big test balloon and splatter on the roof of my mouth, spraying good cheer. I could almost taste it, like a fizzy pink jelly.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me. Oh, yes, and one time she bought me lotion with vitamin E.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Why bother? It’s impossible to compete with the dead.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I hadn’t necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes—bad, cry—like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents’ names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to being a shallow person.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“There was just me, left wretched in my childhood bed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Reporters are like vampires, Curry likes to say. They can't come into your home without your invitation, but once they're there, you won't get them out till they've sucked you dry.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“No wedding ring. I wondered when I began to notice such things.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects