Dark Places Quotes

“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 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, Dark Places

“The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, 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, Dark Places

“I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places

“I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Don't be discouraged - every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Coffee goes great with sudden death.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places

“Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places

“Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Dark Places

“Do you understand this is serious?"

"I understand you think it's serious.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places

“I've had the blues for twenty-four years.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places

“I'm like that, nothing sticks.”
― Gillian Flynn, 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, Dark Places