Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.”

— Gillian Flynn

202. “There were a lot of people who deserved a lesson, deserved to really understand, that nothing came easy, that most things were going to go sour.”

— Gillian Flynn

203. “People judge. Fast.”

— Gillian Flynn

204. “We’re into this barrage of pop culture – you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we’ve made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.”

— Gillian Flynn

205. “Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times.”

— Gillian Flynn

206. “I’m not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age.”

— Gillian Flynn

207. “DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

209. “In Amma’s snideness, I caught a whiff of desperation and righteousness. Like she’d whined at breakfast: I wish I’d be murdered. Amma didn’t want anyone to get more attention than her. Certainly not girls who couldn’t compete when they were alive.”

— Gillian Flynn

210. “Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that’s why someone had invented a saying like that. So we’d all know that we’d never have what we needed.”

— Gillian Flynn

211. “His brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he’d been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn’t ten.”

— Gillian Flynn

212. “There was just me, left wretched in my childhood bed.”

— Gillian Flynn

213. “Lyle Wirth looked like a serial killer. Which meant he probably wasn’t one. If you were chopping up hookers or eating runaways, you’d try to look normal.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

215. “I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I’m about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don’t have the brains or energy to fix them.”

— Gillian Flynn

216. “She talked to me because we had the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia.”

— Gillian Flynn

217. “I paced a bit, tried to remember how to breathe right, how to calm my skin. But it blared at me. Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own.”

— Gillian Flynn

218. “I’d go out each morning and beg for six hours. I knew who to approach and for how long and exactly what to say. I was never ashamed. What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money.”

— Gillian Flynn

219. “My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don’t need to give myself the willies. I’m quite good at that – I can freak myself out wherever I am.”

— Gillian Flynn

220. “Millions of dollars later, and neither of them were happy. Money is wasted on the rich.”

— Gillian Flynn

221. “He’s as smooth and shallow as glass.”

— Gillian Flynn

222. “Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood?”

— Gillian Flynn

223. “I was lying in bed thinking about killing myself, a hobby of mine. Indulgent afternoon daydreaming: A shotgun, my mouth, a bang and my head jerking once, twice, blood on the wall. Spatter, splatter.”

— Gillian Flynn

224. “She defines and eliminates problems. She’s practical in an evil way.”

— Gillian Flynn

225. “Another time-honored ploy: A woman is less likely to throw you out if she’s offered her hospitality. If you have allergies or a cold, asking for a tissue is even better. Women love vulnerability. Most women.”

— Gillian Flynn

226. “Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”

— Gillian Flynn

227. “It’s an insane, insane crime, a lot of it isn’t going to make sense. That’s why people are so obsessed with these murders. If they made any sense, they wouldn’t really be mysteries, right?”

— Gillian Flynn

228. “But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.”

— Gillian Flynn

229. “I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up – because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away.”

— Gillian Flynn

230. “She’s a planner. She doesn’t, you know, wing anything. She likes to make lists and check things off, get things done.”

— Gillian Flynn

231. “I hate people who start conversations with facts – what are you supposed to do with that? Sure is hot today. Yes, it is.”

— Gillian Flynn

232. “You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic contract. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.”

— Gillian Flynn

233. “My brother slaughtered my family when I was seven. My mom, two sisters, gone: bang bang, chop chop, choke choke.”

— Gillian Flynn

234. “She had an invisible friend, a giant stuffed bear she called Ben. What kind of kid has an imaginary friend that’s a stuffed animal? She collected hair ribbons and arranged them in alphabetical order by color name. She was the kind of girl who exploited her cuteness with such joy you couldn’t begrudge her.”

— Gillian Flynn

235. “Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails. Mine was the day Marian died. The day I picked up that knife is a tight second.”

— Gillian Flynn

236. “I finally understood – nearly twenty years too late.”

— Gillian Flynn

237. “Don’t be a scared, dickless boy all your life, letting people push you around, letting people bring up the fear in you.”

— Gillian Flynn

238. “I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout.”

— Gillian Flynn

239. “I could feel the night hanging on me like a soft, damp bedgown.”

— Gillian Flynn

240. “She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper.”

— Gillian Flynn

241. “She was clearly rich. Her handbag was too plain to be anything but incredibly expensive.”

— Gillian Flynn

242. “I like other people’s things better. They come with other people’s history.”

— Gillian Flynn

243. “If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.”

— Gillian Flynn

244. “Desi rarely says jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips.”

— Gillian Flynn

245. “I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there – hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen.”

— Gillian Flynn

246. “Against the far wall was a wire cage holding a pack of unblinking bunnies. World’s dumbest pet, I thought. Who would want an animal that sat, quivered, and shat everywhere? They say you can litter-box train them, but they lie.”

— Gillian Flynn

247. “I really wanted the book to make money, in an obsessive childish way – that feeling that if I wanted it enough, it should happen. It should happen.”

— Gillian Flynn

248. “Sick and sicker and sickest. What was real and what was fake? Was Amma really sick and needing my mother’s medicine, or was the medicine what was making Amma sick? Did her blue pill make me vomit, or did it keep me from getting more ill than I’d have been without it?”

— Gillian Flynn

249. “It is always consoling to think of suicide; it’s what gets one through many a bad night.”

— Gillian Flynn

250. “TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy.”

— Gillian Flynn