Gillian Flynn Quotes

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“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.”

“I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite.”

“Sometimes it is all too loud.”

“In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn't have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation.”

“See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

“Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.”

“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 anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can.”

“I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.”

“I never knew I was capable of being ridiculous over a man. It's a relief.”

“Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.”

“Daydreams can be dangerous.”

“Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.”

“To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.”

“Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite”

“I don't have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I've earned that.”

“I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.”

“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.”

“I was the embodiment of every writer's worst fear: a cliché.”

“You don't ever want to be the wife who keeps her husband from playing poker - you don't ever want to be the shrew with the curlers and the rolling pin. So you swallow your disappointment and say okay.”

“It’s a very female thing, isn’t it, to take one boys’ night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?”

“I'm in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. 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?”

“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.”

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

“I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.”

“Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.”

“He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.”

“If she's sad or upset or angry, she needs to be alone-she fears a man dismissing her womanly tears.”

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. 'Stop thinking', swig, 'empty your head', swig, 'now, seriously empty your head'.”

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

“And sometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices--and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be, I find offensive.”

“Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco.”

“Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.”

“Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don't have to worry about life anymore.”

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom.”

“It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn't always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn't.”

“I've had the blues for twenty-four years.”

“Sometimes I feel like Nick has decided on a version of me that doesn't exist.”

“It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.”

“I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ.”

“Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax.”

“He Giving Treed me out of existence.”

“She'll never really let me go. She likes the game too much."
"Then stop playing it.”

“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.”

“She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.”

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

“No one I've loved has ever not had an agenda.”

“So are there any asshole guys here I can start dating?' she says. 'That's, like, my pattern.”

“I'm tired of dying.”

“Do you understand this is serious?"

"I understand you think it's serious.”