Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

107. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

122. “I was a man of jagged risings.”

— Gillian Flynn

123. “Everyone has a moment when life goes off the rails.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

132. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

135. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

137. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

143. “Why bother? It’s impossible to compete with the dead.”

— Gillian Flynn

144. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

146. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

148. “Feeling sad means having too much time on your hands, usually. Really. I’m not a licensed therapist but usually it means too much time.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

150. “What have we done to eachother?”

— Gillian Flynn