Gillian Flynn famous quotes

Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Awful #Lasts #Flaws

My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Mother #Kids #Ideas

Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Real #Men #Giving

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Sleep #Cat

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

#Real #Dark #Might

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Humbling

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.)
-- Gillian Flynn

#Fighting #Men #Giving

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Beautiful #Butterfly #Land

It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Night #Daylight #Hours

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Ideas #Differences #Loving Someone

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

#Real #Character #Personality

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Memories #Feelings #Cold

To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Refuse #Consequence

The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Humanity #Flaws #Capacity

The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Lying #Waiting #Feelings

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Fashion #Stupid #Thinking

How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?
-- Gillian Flynn

#Sky #Safe #Empty

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Summer #Senior #Dirty

Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times
-- Gillian Flynn

#Should #Partners #All Time

I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival
-- Gillian Flynn

#Depressing #Believe #Danish

I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.
-- Gillian Flynn

#World

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Dark #Bars #World

To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Pain #Way #Calm

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Book #Transition

To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Mystery #Ultimate

We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Style #Different #Culture

I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Crush #Thinking #Realizing

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark.
-- Gillian Flynn

#People #Towns #Kind

Everytime people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Clothes #People #Ugly

Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Worry #Enough

My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Mom #Dad #Kind

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Way #Raised

Coffee goes great with sudden death.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Coffee #Sudden Death

I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Sobriety #Clear #Harder

Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Mean #Shallow #Well Being

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?
-- Gillian Flynn

#Simple #Magic #Phrases

She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Compliment #Like You #Easy

I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Hands #Dancing #Fake

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Children #Home #People

People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Talking #People #Lips

I often don't say things 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.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Despair #Degrees #Bottles

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

#Children #Soul #Adults

I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Happiness #Together #Being Together

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Giving #World #Faces

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

#Thinking #Tampons #Pads

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.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Suicidal #Mean #Blow

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

#Pain #Men #Thinking

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Reading #Party #Men

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

#Layers #Protection #Liquor

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Trying #Impossible #Stop Trying

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Children #Comfort #Poison

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

#Mouths #Tampons #Body

I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Daughter #Mother #Thinking

To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Dream #Lovely

Problems always start long before you really, really see them.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Long #Problem

Safer to be feared than loved.
-- Gillian Flynn

I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Ends #Periods #Sentences

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

#Yellow #Exhausted #Weak

Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Fear #Thinking #Hands

My brain goes very easily into the darkness. It always has. There are people who like to see what's under the rock and people who don't, and for some reason I've always been one of those to say, 'Hey, let's flip over that rock.'
-- Gillian Flynn

#Rocks #People #Darkness

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Kids #Ideas #Imagination

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

#Friday #Monday #Home

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Thinking #Issues #Interesting

Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Fear #Thinking #Doors

The question I've asked more often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I supposed these questions storm cloud over every marriage: What are you thinking how are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?
-- Gillian Flynn

#Fear #Thinking #Clouds

For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Cutting #Doctors #Names

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: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?
-- Gillian Flynn

#Baby #Writing #Eye

Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Giving #Perspective #Drink

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Play #Soul #Acting

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Bird #Gone #Grievance

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

#Discouraged

I've suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Betrayal #Years #Five Senses

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Clubs #Republican #Democrat

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

#Home #Thinking #Long

I had no sympathy for drama queens.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Queens #Drama #No Sympathy

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite
-- Gillian Flynn

#Kryptonite #People #Ironic

I would have done anything to feel real again.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Real #Done #Feels

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'
-- Gillian Flynn

#Book #People #Giving

I'm a true-crime addict. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can't stop.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Proud #Crime #Addict

There are no really new stories anymore.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Stories

He was one of those guys who'd pronounce I'm a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.
-- Gillian Flynn

#Kissing #Guy #Feelings