Gillian Flynn Quotes & Sayings

...I am stuck here on earth, and every day is a chance to be less than perfect. — Gillian Flynn

I know, I know, I'm being a girl. — Gillian Flynn

But one day I will wear him down, I will catch him off guard, and he will lose the energy for the nightly battle, and he will get in bed with me. In the middle of the night, I'll turn to face him and press myself against him. I'll hold myself to him like a climbing, coiling vine until I have invaded every part of him and made him mine. — Gillian Flynn

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

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

being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made. — Gillian Flynn

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

It requires discipline, to drown oneself, but I have discipline in spades. My body may never be discovered, or it may resurface weeks, months, later
eroded to the point that my death can't be time-stamped
and I will provide a last bit of evidence to make sure Nick is marched to the padded cross, the prison table where he'll be pumped with poison and die. — Gillian Flynn

Oh, that sounds like too — Gillian Flynn

It's not easy, pairing yourself off with someone forever. It's an admirable thing, and I'm glad you're both doing it, but, boy-oh-girl-oh, there will be days you wish you'd never done it. And those will be the good times, when it's only days of regret and not months. — Gillian Flynn

DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison — Gillian Flynn

The house was like something from a catalog, and there were two BMWs in the driveway and these were not people who — Gillian Flynn

I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone. — Gillian Flynn

He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room. — Gillian Flynn

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

You're sexist. I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination. — Gillian Flynn

I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who'd end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town. — Gillian Flynn

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

I'm a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up.) I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people - people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin - that they'd be bored as hell by me. — Gillian Flynn

The nurses gave us meds to alleviate our tingling skins. And more meds to soothe our burning brains. — Gillian Flynn

I know I am right not to settle, — Gillian Flynn

I don't mean this to sound cruel," Tish began, "but it seems like part of your heart can never work if you don't have kids. Like it will always be shut off." "I agree," Katie said. "I didn't really become a woman until I felt Mackenzie inside me. I mean, there's all this talk these days of God versus science, but it seems like, with babies, both sides agree. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply, and science, well, when it all boils down, that's what women were made for, right? To bear children." "Girl power," Becca muttered under her breath. — Gillian Flynn

But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can't do it, but I can applaud it in others. "Well," I said. "There are definitely — Gillian Flynn

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

It's easy to like pregnant women - they're like ducklings or bunnies or dogs. — Gillian Flynn

If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we'd all have a very Merry Christmas, — Gillian Flynn

You're a man who cheats on his wife, you can't ever undo that. — Gillian Flynn

He thought I'd be his best reporter, said I had a surprising mind. In my two years on the job I'd consistently fallen short of expectations. — Gillian Flynn

It seemed to me that she'd been expelled into this world not quite formed, — Gillian Flynn

She's a planner. She doesn't, you know, wing anything. She likes to make lists and check things off, get things done. — Gillian Flynn

Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. — Gillian Flynn

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

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff. — Gillian Flynn

That's how screwed up you are, I thought. Your idea of adulthood still comes from picturebooks. — Gillian Flynn

I put on a skirt and blouse for the meeting, feeling dwarfy, my grown up, big-girl clothes never quite fitting. I'm barely five foot -- four foot, ten inches in truth, but I round up. Sue me. I'm thirty-one, but people tend to talk to me in singsong, like they want to give me fingerpaints. — Gillian Flynn

People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. — Gillian Flynn

The X had released its first wave of chemical optimism, I could feel it float up inside me like a big test balloon and splatter on the roof of my mouth, spraying good cheer. I could almost taste it, like a fizzy pink jelly. — Gillian Flynn

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

We could have been day players in an amateur porn flick. — Gillian Flynn

Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. — Gillian Flynn

I don't know anyone's name. If one of those women died, I couldn't even say, "Poor old Mrs. Zalinsky died." I'd have to say, "That mean old bitch across the street bit it. — Gillian Flynn

Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. — Gillian Flynn

I'd let the words run over my brain and out my ears, like a terrified cancer patient hearing all that coded jargon and understanding nothing, except that it was very bad news. — Gillian Flynn

People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands. — Gillian Flynn

The world will always need a drink — Gillian Flynn

I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. — Gillian Flynn

Sick and sicker and sickest. What was real and what was fake? Was Amma really sick and needing my mother's medicine, or was the medicine what was making Amma sick? Did her blue pill make me vomit, or did it keep me from getting more ill than I'd have been without it? — Gillian Flynn

I'll be interested to hear what the swine has to say for himself, he says. Desi rarely says jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips. — Gillian Flynn

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

To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing. — Gillian Flynn

Please let him look. I didn't need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I am. — Gillian Flynn

The midwest is full of these types of people. The nice enoughs but with a soul made of plastic. Easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman's entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. Her books shelves are stocked with coffee table crap The Irish in America, Mizzou Football - A History in Pictures, We Remember 911, something dumb with kittens. I knew I needed a pliant friend for my plan, someone I could load up with awful stories about Nick. Someone who would become overly attached to me. Someone who would be easy to manipulate. Who wouldn't think to hard about anything I said because she felt privileged to hear it. — Gillian Flynn

Just got to keep on keeping on — Gillian Flynn

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

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

I knew I liked her then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation for everything. — Gillian Flynn

I've actually felt sad for myself, picturing my slim, naked, pale body, floating just beneath the current, a colony of snails attached to one bare leg, my hair trailing like seaweed until I reach the ocean and drift down down down to the bottom, my waterlogged flesh peeling off in soft streaks, me slowly disappearing into the current like a watercolor until just the bones are left. — Gillian Flynn

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

Item 33: Get the fuck out of Dodge. Check, check, check. — Gillian Flynn

I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I could make a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I could be a different kind of father than my dad was. — Gillian Flynn

She defines and eliminates problems. She's practical in an evil way. — Gillian Flynn

The bad guy wins? Fuck him. — Gillian Flynn

See, Curry, Detective Willis felt I was holding back some information and so he sulked off, like all men do when they don't get their way with women they've fooled around with. — Gillian Flynn

I knew you could do it, I knew you could, Libby," she mumbled into my hair, warm and smoky.
"Do what?"
"Try just a little harder. — Gillian Flynn

Every phrase had to be captured on paper or it wasn't real, it slipped away. I'd see the words hanging in midair
Camille, pass the milk
and anxiety coiled up in me as they began to fade, like jet exhaust. Writing them down, though, I had them. No worries that they'd become extinct. I was a lingual conservationist. I was the class freak, a tight, nervous eighth-grader frenziedly copying down phrases ("Mr. Feeney is totally gay," "Jamie Dobson is ugly," "They never have chocolate milk") with a keenness bordering on the religious. — Gillian Flynn

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

I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. — Gillian Flynn

Len never said hello as a greeting; he said something like a yodel, He-a-lo! — Gillian Flynn

A few moments of discipline. What a pure way to die. — Gillian Flynn

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good. I get a bit piqued when people say, 'I don't really like that kind of book.' It's akin to marking yourself as proudly poorly read. — Gillian Flynn

Now, I like a writer party, I like writers, I am the child of writers, I am a writer. I still love scribbling that word - WRITER - anytime — Gillian Flynn

At one point, she probably liked the idea of a daughter. When she was a girl, I bet she daydreamed of being a mother, of coddling, of licking her child like a milk-swelled cat. She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public, was a beloved child. — Gillian Flynn

I DIDN'T STOP giving hand jobs because I wasn't good at it. I stopped giving hand jobs because I was the best at it. For three years, I gave the best hand job in the tristate area. The key is to not overthink it. If you start worrying about technique, if you begin analyzing rhythm and pressure, you lose the essential nature of the act. You have to mentally prepare beforehand, and then you have to stop thinking and trust your body to take over. Basically, it's like a golf swing. — Gillian Flynn

It was him. The boy in 'I met a boy! — Gillian Flynn

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

She had an unnecessarily loud voice, a bit of a bray, like some enchanted, hot donkey. — Gillian Flynn

I'd always liked our inside jokes the best - they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising. — Gillian Flynn

Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past. — Gillian Flynn

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

I hate people who start conversations with facts - what are you supposed to do with that? Sure is hot today. Yes, it is. — Gillian Flynn

He has given me exactly ten Fritos and then secreted away the bag. He doesn't like the smell; it offends him, he says, but what he really doesn't like is my weight. — Gillian Flynn

He had married this creature, this figment of the imagination of a million masturbatory men, semen-fingered and self-satisfied. — Gillian Flynn

He has a great smile, a cat's smile. He should cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at me. — Gillian Flynn

I just figured you'd be too proud. Self-conscious and proud. I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, — Gillian Flynn

And then I knew I didn't love Amy anymore — Gillian Flynn

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival. — Gillian Flynn

I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people - people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin - that they'd be bored as hell by me. It's a lonely way to go through life. — Gillian Flynn

All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it's so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. — Gillian Flynn

Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. — Gillian Flynn

Daydreams can be dangerous. — Gillian Flynn

It was an itinerary for an alternate life. If things had gone according to my wife's vision, yesterday she would have hovered near me as I read this poem, watching me expectantly, the hope emanating from her like a fever: *Please get this. Please get me.* — Gillian Flynn

Weird that a house so new could feel haunted, and not in the romantic Victorian-novel way, just really gruesomely, shittily ruined. — Gillian Flynn

I didn't think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn't worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn't worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles. I didn't even worry about anything that came next. Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy. — Gillian Flynn

I've grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains - good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn't necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn't qualify either). I'm talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don't tell me you don't know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves - to the point of almost parodic encouragement - we've left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids. — Gillian Flynn

Of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, — Gillian Flynn

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

No one I've loved has ever not had an agenda. — Gillian Flynn

Because everyone loves the Dead Girl. — Gillian Flynn

That's always been part of my goal - to show the dark side of women. Men write about bad men all the time, and they're called antiheroes. ... What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations, not necessarily for a hero's journey. It's to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic. — Gillian Flynn

I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear. — Gillian Flynn