Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Everytime people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.”

— Gillian Flynn

52. “Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that’s how the hating first began. I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s where it started, I think.”

— Gillian Flynn

53. “My story for the day was a limp sort of evil.”

— Gillian Flynn

54. “My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?? He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you. But he said,‘Because I feel sorry for you.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

56. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

58. “It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.”

— Gillian Flynn

59. “We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”

— Gillian Flynn

60. “He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.”

— Gillian Flynn

61. “I would have done anything to feel real again.”

— Gillian Flynn

62. “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 thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.”

— Gillian Flynn

63. “Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite.”

— Gillian Flynn

64. “Nick loved me. A six-o kind of love: He looooooved me. But he didn’t love me, me. Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. 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.”

— Gillian Flynn

65. “She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.”

— Gillian Flynn

66. “There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”

— Gillian Flynn

67. “The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”

— Gillian Flynn

68. “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

69. “Money is wasted on the rich.”

— Gillian Flynn

70. “There are no really new stories anymore.”

— Gillian Flynn

71. “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

72. “Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.”

— Gillian Flynn

73. “Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects, Camille.”

— Gillian Flynn

74. “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

75. “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. She looks nice today, I’d think, but somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud.”

— Gillian Flynn

76. “Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you to like her. She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment – that just anyone could like you. No matter.”

— Gillian Flynn

77. “Women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves... we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.”

— Gillian Flynn

78. “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

79. “I like checking days off a calendar – 151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn’t ruined. 153 and I haven’t destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me. 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.”

— Gillian Flynn

80. “Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.”

— Gillian Flynn

81. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

82. “I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me. Oh, yes, and one time she bought me lotion with vitamin E.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

84. “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

85. “I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.”

— Gillian Flynn

86. “I’ve always thought I could commit the perfect murder. People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan.”

— Gillian Flynn

87. “Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.”

— Gillian Flynn

88. “Problems always start long before you really, really see them.”

— Gillian Flynn

89. “And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”

— Gillian Flynn

90. “He’s calling you a Cool Girl to fool you! That’s what men do: they try to make it sound like you are the cool girl so you will bow to their wishes. Like a car salesman saying, how much do you want to pay for this beauty? When you didn’t agree to buy it yet.”

— Gillian Flynn

91. “I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.”

— Gillian Flynn

92. “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

93. “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

94. “He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. 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

95. “It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thorn bush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

— Gillian Flynn

96. “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

97. “To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.”

— Gillian Flynn

98. “I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.”

— Gillian Flynn

99. “Unconditional love is an undisciplined love and, as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”

— Gillian Flynn

100. “It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.”

— Gillian Flynn