Nick Dunne Quotes

“My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all… It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.”

“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.”

“A year ago today, I was undoing my husband. Now I am almost done reassembling him.”

“But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy, all the time. Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them.”

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”

“I know sometimes you think you are moving through this world alone, unseen, unnoticed. But don’t believe that for a second. I have made a study of you. I know what you are going to do before you do it. I know where you’ve been and I know where you’re going. For this anniversary, I’ve arranged a trip: Follow your beloved river, up up up!”

“I thought it would make me feel better to have the man vanished from the earth, but I actually felt a massive, frightening hollowness open up in my chest. I had spent my life comparing myself to my father, and now he was gone.”

“I often don’t say this 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.”

“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 things as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.”

“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 was speaking loudly, I realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous, but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger.”

“Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife, but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her.”

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

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”

“Go is truly the only person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don’t feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don’t clarify, I don’t doubt, I don’t worry. I don’t tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than I tell anyone else, by far.”

“The moony, girlish state her notes had left me in, it sickened me. It embarrassed me. Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes a part of your DNA, that changes you. After all these years, Amy could still play me. She could write a few notes and get me back completely.”