Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Winter. No one likes winter.” “It gets dark early, I like that.” “Why?” Because that means the day has ended. 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.”

— Gillian Flynn

104. “You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?” “Mmm.” “What if it’s the opposite?” Amma whispered. “What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?”

— Gillian Flynn

105. “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

106. “I’m a huge fan of ghost stories, that sort of slow build, the suspense and the questioning about whether you’re imagining something or if it’s real.”

— Gillian Flynn

107. “To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way.”

— Gillian Flynn

108. “Frank Curry thinks I’m a soft touch. Might be because I’m a woman. Might be because I’m a soft touch.”

— Gillian Flynn

109. “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

110. “When we got home, she’d trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I’d done to displease her.”

— Gillian Flynn

111. “When a child knows that young that her mother doesn’t care for her, bad things happen.”

— Gillian Flynn

112. “To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing.”

— Gillian Flynn

113. “I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why. I would sit there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun. With Nick, I understood finally. Because he was so much fun. It was like dating a sea otter.”

— Gillian Flynn

114. “I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.”

— Gillian Flynn

115. “Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon?”

— Gillian Flynn

116. “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

117. “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?”

— Gillian Flynn

118. “You have the same rhythm. Click. You just know each other. 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. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It’s finally arrived.”

— Gillian Flynn

119. “I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone.”

— Gillian Flynn

120. “I was a man of jagged risings.”

— Gillian Flynn

121. “I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.”

— Gillian Flynn

122. “Empathetic silence is one of the most underused weapons in the world.”

— Gillian Flynn

123. “Sometimes that’s what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping.”

— Gillian Flynn

124. “I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there – hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body – a Libby that’s telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

126. “Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.”

— Gillian Flynn

127. “I drank the rest of the sours and had dark sticky dreams. My mother had cut me open and was unpacking my organs, stacking them in a row on my bed as my flesh flapped to either side. She was sewing her initials into each of them, then tossing them back into me, along with a passel of forgotten objects:.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

129. “I don’t understand the point of being together if you’re not the happiest.”

— Gillian Flynn

130. “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

131. “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. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation!”

— Gillian Flynn

132. “I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, ‘I’m OK, no worries!’”

— Gillian Flynn

133. “Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.”

— Gillian Flynn

134. “What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh.”

— Gillian Flynn

135. “People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.”

— Gillian Flynn

136. “To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.”

— Gillian Flynn

137. “The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them.”

— Gillian Flynn

138. “Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait?”

— Gillian Flynn

139. “What have we done to eachother?”

— Gillian Flynn

140. “She said in the way you might wish someone good luck on the lottery.”

— Gillian Flynn

141. “Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.”

— Gillian Flynn

142. “Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?”

— Gillian Flynn

143. “Stay away from boys. They’ll either throw rocks or look up your skirt.”

— Gillian Flynn

144. “I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light. 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.”

— Gillian Flynn

145. “Today I like my first ladies with a little bite.”

— Gillian Flynn

146. “We had spent years battling for control of our marriage, of our love story, our life story. I had been thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and she created a life.”

— Gillian Flynn

147. “I’m here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I’m panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I’d be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.”

— Gillian Flynn

148. “My demons aren’t remotely tackled, they’re just mildly concussed.”

— Gillian Flynn

149. “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

150. “I always feel sad for the girl that i was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me.”

— Gillian Flynn