Gillian Flynn Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillian Flynn
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
Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.

Gillian Flynn
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
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
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
What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
Friends see most of each other's flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.

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

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

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

Gillian Flynn