Gillian Flynn Quotes

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.

Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.

Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.

I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.

Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.

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.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'

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

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.

I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

My brain goes very easily into the darkness. It always has. There are people who like to see what's under the rock and people who don't, and for some reason I've always been one of those to say, 'Hey, let's flip over that rock.'

I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

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.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)

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.

There are no really new stories anymore.

To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way.

Don't be discouraged - every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.

Problems always start long before you really, really see them.

People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.

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.

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman's body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth.

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.

Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.

You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.

Everytime people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.

I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

I'm not someone who can be depended one five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don't even get out of bed five days in a row-I often don't remember to eat five days in a row. Reporting to a workplace, where I should need to stay for eight hours-eight big hours outside my home- was unfeasible.

He was one of those guys who'd pronounce I'm a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.

My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

Coffee goes great with sudden death.

Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times

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

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.