Top 40 Gilly Macmillan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If someone lies to you habitually, you can’t ever trust them. It erodes relationships.”

— Gilly Macmillan

2. “Seize the day – be brave – be independent – be thoughtful – don’t be scared to make mistakes – keep learning – all those things, all the time.”

— Gilly Macmillan

3. “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. – F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

— Gilly Macmillan

4. “I believe that if you are lucky enough to have a child, then you should love them, whether or not society labels them as flawed, whether or not you label them as flawed. “You.”

— Gilly Macmillan

5. “Trust is like that. Once you lose it, you begin to adjust your attitudes toward people, you put up guards, and filter the information you want them to know.”

— Gilly Macmillan

6. “Jammie Dodgers.”

— Gilly Macmillan

7. “I didn’t realize that your mind could fall sick without your even noticing: incrementally, darkly, irrevocably.”

— Gilly Macmillan

8. “Faced with a decision about what to tell her, and how to tell her, I bottled. Trust is like that. Once you lose it, you begin to adjust your attitudes toward people, you put up guards, and filter the information you want them to know. I.”

— Gilly Macmillan

9. “Sometimes it’s hard not to let other people’s misery seep into your own bones.”

— Gilly Macmillan

10. “She can do that for ages, and tonight it makes me feel super tense because I feel like the time we have left before Lucas and Chris get home is on one of those kitchen timers that click madly like a bomb that’s going to detonate until they make a screechy buzz that Lucas says sounds like a small bird being strangled.”

— Gilly Macmillan

11. “Those homes were like holding pens, where residents waited for death with little more status than corpses. Loneliness, confusion, pain, and the smell of urine and boiled food seemed to be their only companions as the light faded on their lives. Those places had made me shudder, and sometimes weep. Carpe.”

— Gilly Macmillan

12. “Really, I’ve never understood why we haven’t thought of an English word for Schadenfreude.”

— Gilly Macmillan

13. “If you talk too openly about terrible things people shrink from you.”

— Gilly Macmillan

14. “Astor, who hated children pretending to be animals and was frequently off sick with stress.”

— Gilly Macmillan

15. “Leaves gusted around me like decomposing confetti as the wind began to build, and great masses of foliage shuddered and bent as it whipped through the canopy above.”

— Gilly Macmillan

16. “The way she said his name, the tenderness in those two words, the loss, told me that it was Charlie who she mourned above all.”

— Gilly Macmillan

17. “What I know now is that even after the divorce I should simply have been grateful for what I had. I should have celebrated my life as it was, imperfections, sadness, and all, and not forensically examined its faults. Those faults were largely in the eyes of a critical and sharp-edged society anyhow, and I had learned to recognize them by osmosis, by following the herd.”

— Gilly Macmillan

18. “In ten months you can get used to some of the mechanics of being alone, but it takes longer for the hurt to heal.”

— Gilly Macmillan

19. “I wish now that I’d valued more the words that tumbled freely out of him before he was taken. I wish I’d collected them and kept them safely in packages that I wrapped up carefully, secured with a ribbon, and stored in a safe place for the future. I wish I hadn’t been too distracted to listen to every word he said.”

— Gilly Macmillan

20. “At home, in the empty flat, I wish more than anything that I had somebody who would come home to me tonight, somebody I could tell, somebody who would be with me through it to the end.”

— Gilly Macmillan

21. “I’m tempted to walk away from this city and this life and this relationship that’s brought me the greatest feelings of joy but also the most profound feelings of guilt. I’m tempted to nurse my sorrows elsewhere, to rethink my life.”

— Gilly Macmillan

22. “None of us deserve anything. That’s an illusion we all exist under.”

— Gilly Macmillan

23. “Were they being kind by not contacting me? Was that a thoughtful response? Or had they backed off now that I was tainted by misfortune, now that I was the person to whom the worst had happened, the one at the sharp end of the statistical wedge, where nobody else wants to be. I.”

— Gilly Macmillan

24. “In the eyes of others, we’re often not who we imagine ourselves to be.”

— Gilly Macmillan

25. “There are some events and uncertainties that you take to the grave, and they threaten to tumble you every single step of the way. If.”

— Gilly Macmillan

26. “Grace has such simple needs. Wake, give love, receive love, refuel, expend energy, sleep. I love that about her.”

— Gilly Macmillan

27. “They saw me as a freak show. I frightened people because I was someone to whom the worst was happening, and they turned on me like a pack of dogs. I’ve.”

— Gilly Macmillan

28. “Carpe diem was the lesson to be learned. It’s what I had been trying to teach Ben when I let him run ahead in the woods. Seize the day – be brave – be independent – be thoughtful – don’t be scared to make mistakes – keep learning – all of those things, all the time. And somebody had taken him. More fool me. Ruth’s.”

— Gilly Macmillan

29. “John couldn’t stand the waiting. He wanted to do something, so he spent most of the night driving around, circling the woods, following the routes back into Bristol, just in case. Each time he returned, he sat in my car and asked me to go over what had happened. ‘I’ve told you,’ I said, when he asked for the third time.”

— Gilly Macmillan

30. “I’m not sure now whether we ever loved each other very deeply, or if it wasn’t more that we were two lost souls when we met, huddling together for comfort. What.”

— Gilly Macmillan

31. “What interests me now is that it might have been the betrayal of convention I felt most keenly, because in some way I felt I was owed the life we had together, and that I didn’t deserve the public humiliation of him leaving me for another woman. But here’s the thing: none of us deserve anything. That’s an illusion we all exist under.”

— Gilly Macmillan

32. “Our friendship didn’t survive. Some things are too big for other people to bear.”

— Gilly Macmillan

33. “My insomnia makes a desperate, restless soul of me. There is no creativity, only hopelessness and frustration.”

— Gilly Macmillan

34. “And you need to be alert to.”

— Gilly Macmillan

35. “Instead, I count my blessings every day for my blemished, damaged family, which is full of love, and that is fine, and that is all we need and all Ben needs to know.”

— Gilly Macmillan

36. “When we first meet someone, we can put our best foot forward, and give the very best account of ourselves, but still get it horribly wrong.”

— Gilly Macmillan

37. “But here’s the thing: none of us deserve anything. That’s an illusion we all exist under. What I know now is that even after the divorce I should simply have been grateful for what I had. I should have celebrated my life as it was, imperfections, sadness, and all, and not forensically examined its faults.”

— Gilly Macmillan

38. “I should have celebrated my life as it was, imperfections, sadness, and all, and not forensically examined its faults.”

— Gilly Macmillan

39. “If we’re not who we imagine we are, then is anybody else? If there’s so much potential for others to judge us wrongly, then how can we be sure that our assessment of them in any way resembles the real person that lies underneath?”

— Gilly Macmillan

40. “This is what a total breakdown must be, I though. You find yourself standing somewhere you should’t be, doing something so out of character that you wonder if you’ve become someone else entirely. You’ve lost the plot, taken a wrong turning, jumped into a train whose destination is total lunacy.”

— Gilly Macmillan

41. “A year ago, just after Ben’s disappearance, I was involved in a press conference, which was televised. My role was to appeal for help in finding him. The police gave me a script to read. I assumed people watching it would automatically understand who I was, that they would see I was a mother whose child was missing, and who cared about nothing apart from getting him back. Many.”

— Gilly Macmillan

42. “I even felt resentful towards my body, towards it’s demands for sleep. for food, for drink, for bodily functions. I thought that life should stop until Ben was found. Clocks should no longer tick, oxygen should no longer be exchanged for carbon dioxide in our lungs, and our hearts should not pump. Only when he was back should normal service resume.”

— Gilly Macmillan

43. “I should have celebrated my life as it was, imperfections, sadness and all, and not forensically examined its faults. Those faults were largely in the eyes of a critical and sharp-edged society anyhow, and I had learned to recognize them by osmosis, by following the herd. I had not yet learned to use my intelligence, or to trust in my instincts. I see more clearly now, and I shall never make that mistake again.”

— Gilly Macmillan

44. “I marveled at how the mundane activities that life demanded still needed to be done, even while the worst was happening.”

— Gilly Macmillan

45. “Think for a moment of your life as a path that you’re moving forward on, not a place you’re stuck in. You can deal with this appropriately, and respectfully, and if you do that it will be possible to put it behind you.”

— Gilly Macmillan

46. “Words flow for me when I’m writing, but they can stick in my throat like a hairball when I have to speak up for myself.”

— Gilly Macmillan

47. “Jesus College “Forward it to me please, Jim,” she said once she’d read it. “There’s.”

— Gilly Macmillan

48. “I had mixed feelings about it: a queasy combination of flattery and discomfort, but sometimes mixed feelings are the hardest to resist indulging in. They can make us feel alive again.”

— Gilly Macmillan