Gillian Flynn quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Amy! My God! My God! My darling!' and buried my face in her neck, my arms wrapped tight around her, and let the cameras get their fifteen seconds, and I whispered deep inside her ear, 'You fucking bitch."

  • I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again.

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

  • I had no sympathy for drama queens.

  • Who would I be without Amy to react to? Because she was right: As a man, I had been my most impressive when I loved her -- and I was my next best self when I hated her.

  • My thank-yous always come out rather labored. I often don't give them at all. People do what they're supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation -- they're like frozen-yogurt employees who put out cups for tips.

  • 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?

  • Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness.

  • You're a man who cheats on his wife, you can't ever undo that.

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

  • 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.)

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple.

  • 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.

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

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

  • We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves.

  • Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.

  • We will have a happy marriage if it kills him.

  • Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet.

  • It's not easy, pairing yourself off with someone forever. It's an admirable thing, and I'm glad you're both doing it, but, boy-oh-girl-oh, there will be days you wish you'd never done it. And those will be the good times, when it's only days of regret and not months."

  • New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.

  • And sometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices--and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be looked after, I find offensive.

  • There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won't bite. 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.

  • I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

  • That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.

  • Do not antagonize the cops, I told myself. Repeat if necessary: Do not antagonize the cops.

  • I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

  • I'm just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.

  • She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

  • I know, I know, I'm being a girl.

  • Libby wasn't a big talker - Michelle and Debby seemed to hog all her words. She made pronouncements: I like ponies. I hate spaghetti. I hate you. Like her mother, she had no poker face. No poker mood. It was all right there. When she wasn't angry or sad, she just didn't say much.

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

  • It is always consoling to think of suicide;it's what gets one through many a bad night.

  • ...and 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.

  • People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about.

  • 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.

  • The question I've asked more often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I supposed these questions storm cloud over every marriage: What are you thinking how are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

  • Coffee goes great with sudden death.

  • Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.

  • 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.

  • I've always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication, a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.

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

  • I'm a true-crime addict. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can't stop.

  • 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.

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

  • And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

  • Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.

  • 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?

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

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

  • For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.

  • How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?

  • I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.

  • I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

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

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

  • 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 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.

  • I just think some women aren't made to be mothers. And some women aren't made to be daughters.

  • I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

  • I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.

  • I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

  • 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.

  • I would have done anything to feel real again.

  • I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

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

  • I've suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.

  • 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.

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

  • Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.

  • 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.'

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco.

  • Safer to be feared than loved.

  • She's easy to like. I've never understood why that's considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.

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

  • Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.

  • Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.

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

  • The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.

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

  • There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.

  • There are no really new stories anymore.

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

  • To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.

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

  • To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

  • 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.

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