“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.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“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.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were okay, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that simply wasn't so”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“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)”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Don't be discouraged - every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Coffee goes great with sudden death.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won't bite. The only line that pisses me off faster is when some drunk, ham-faced dude in a bar sees me trying to get past him and barks: Smile,it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“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, quote from Dark Places
“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, quote from Dark Places
“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”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“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, quote from Dark Places
“I've had the blues for twenty-four years.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“When I was fourteen, I thought a lot about killing myself—it’s a hobby today, but at age fourteen it was a vocation. On a September morning, just after school started, I’d gotten Diane’s .44 Magnum and held it, babylike, in my lap for hours. What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart. But I thought about Diane, and her coming home to my small torso and a red wall, and I couldn’t do it. It’s probably why I was so hateful to her, she kept me from what I wanted the most.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can't quite bear to look at. I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Do you understand this is serious?"
"I understand you think it's serious.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“A veces sienta bien joder a alguien. En vez de que siempre lo jodan a uno”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“It seemed like a joke, how much all of these dudes looked alike, like living was so hard it just erased your features, rubbed out anything distinctive.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“I felt hollowed out. My mom's death was not useful. I felt a shot of rage at her, and then imagined those last bloody moments in the house, when she realized it had gone wrong, when Debby lay dying, and it was all over, her unsterling life.
My anger gave way to a strange tenderness, what a mother might feel for her child, and I thought, At least she tried. She tried, on that final day, as hard as anyone could have tried.
And I would try to find peace in that.”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment—at least one moment—when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?”
― Gillian Flynn, quote from Dark Places
“What are all those people doing under the trees?” I asked. “Those are students,” Grandpa said. “They’re probably studying their lessons. They have their classes inside those buildings.” “That wouldn’t be a bad place to go to school,” I said. “Instead of having to stay in the schoolhouse to study, you could just go outside and sit under a tree. I think I’d like that.” “I hope I live to see the day when you go to college here,” Grandpa said. “Do you think you’d like it?”
― Wilson Rawls, quote from Summer of the Monkeys
“I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from A Soldier of the Great War
“Let’s say you are an empty vessel. So what? What’s wrong with that?” Eri said. “You’re still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from Thinner
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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