Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

253. “Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment – at least one moment – when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?”

— Gillian Flynn

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Gillian Flynn

257. “People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan.”

— Gillian Flynn

258. “That’s how screwed up you are, I thought. Your idea of adulthood still comes from picturebooks.”

— Gillian Flynn

259. “I can feel a better version of me somewhere.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

261. “You can like an immoral character because she’s interesting, not because you want to have her over for dinner.”

— Gillian Flynn

262. “Things might not be great, but things would be okay.”

— Gillian Flynn

263. “I realized I was humming “Uncle John’s Band” to myself for no good reason.”

— Gillian Flynn

264. “A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies.”

— Gillian Flynn

265. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

266. “So you can see why the whole hand-job thing felt like a natural career progression.”

— Gillian Flynn

267. “Libby must have marinated in anxious stomach acid for nine months, soaking up all that worry.”

— Gillian Flynn

268. “That’s what I did, though – I had angry, defensive conversations in my head, got mad at things that hadn’t even happened yet. Yet.”

— Gillian Flynn

269. “When I take to my bed, it’s good to know whether I’m sick or just lazy.”

— Gillian Flynn

270. “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

— Gillian Flynn

271. “We Got Llamas!” Odd words to see in neon.”

— Gillian Flynn

272. “What can I say about a man who knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off?”

— Gillian Flynn

273. “I never worked holidays, because holiday hand jobs are sad for everyone.”

— Gillian Flynn

274. “For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

276. “In a few years you may find a Starbucks, which will bring the town what it yearns for: prepackaged, preapproved mainstream hipness.”

— Gillian Flynn

277. “Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.”

— Gillian Flynn

278. “To me, all that urgent hopefulness was more frightening than if I’d found a pile of skulls with hair still attached. I ran out in full panic, my underwear tucked up a sleeve.”

— Gillian Flynn

279. “I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music.”

— Gillian Flynn

280. “I just want to live until I can’t anymore.”

— Gillian Flynn

281. “I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one – like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.”

— Gillian Flynn

282. “People behaved mostly well and then they died.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

284. “I’d let the words run over my brain and out my ears, like a terrified cancer patient hearing all that coded jargon and understanding nothing, except that it was very bad news.”

— Gillian Flynn

285. “I was lying in bed thinking of killing myself, a hobby of mine.”

— Gillian Flynn

286. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

287. “They were women not strong enough or smart enough to leave. Women without imagination. So they stayed in Wind Gap and played their teenage lives on an endless loop.”

— Gillian Flynn

288. “Feeling sad means having too much time on your hands, usually.”

— Gillian Flynn

289. “Nothing to it but to do it, nothing to it but to do it.” Diane’s mantra.”

— Gillian Flynn

290. “I’m not really a nerd; I only aspire to be one.”

— Gillian Flynn

291. “He felt like an animal limping away, some wounded buck that needed to be put down.”

— Gillian Flynn

292. “I wanted to slice barren into my skin. That’s how I’d stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal.”

— Gillian Flynn

293. “Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. With Diane, worries were almost physical beings, leechy creatures with latchhooks for fingers, meant to be vanquished immediately. Diane didn’t worry, that was for less hearty women.”

— Gillian Flynn

294. “She had perfect skin, so free of blotches or wrinkles, her face so perfect and character-free she could have just popped out of the womb. They all seemed unfinished. I wanted them to go away.”

— Gillian Flynn

295. “But she did invite me to her house, and women like that don’t invite over women like me unless they want something.”

— Gillian Flynn

296. “I could feel my limbs disconnecting, floating nearby like driftwood on an oily lake.”

— Gillian Flynn

297. “I couldn’t decide if I’d been mistreated. By Richard, by those boys who took my virginity, by anyone. I was never really on my side in any argument.”

— Gillian Flynn

298. “If I say I don’t want to read the book, I don’t want to read the book.”

— Gillian Flynn

299. “Only Tanner Bolt could get away with making me, a client, fly to him, then tell me what kind of dance I’d need to do in order to give him my money.”

— Gillian Flynn

300. “Amy knew that was what I had loved most about us back when I loved us: not the big moments, not the Romantic with capital-R moments, but our secret inside jokes.”

— Gillian Flynn