JP > JP's Quotes

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“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, Dark Places

“I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them. Burning on my left hip: petticoat.

And near it, my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. I remember feeling that word, heavy and slightly sticky across my pubic bone. My mother's steak knife. Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself. Pouring bleach over the knife and sneaking through the kitchen to return it. Wicked. Relief. The rest of the day, I spent ministering to my wound. Dig into the curves of W with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip. Pet my cheek until the sting went away. Lotion. Bandage. Repeat.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living.”
― A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window

“some people get addicted to feeling bad because whenever they feel good they feel guilty.”
― Ania Ahlborn, Brother

“You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“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.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“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.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

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. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

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-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like 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?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Problems always start long before you really, really see them.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Safer to be feared than loved.”
― 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 miles of weak piss.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“There was nothing I wanted to do more than be unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away. I was raw. I felt swollen with potential tears, like a water balloon filled to burst. Begging for a pin prick.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I've always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication, a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“This is the unforgiving light of the morning, time to drop the illusion.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes it is all too loud.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”
― 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.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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