Top 190 Quotes & Sayings by Gillian Flynn - Page 3

To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.

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

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

Safer to be feared than loved.

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

There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.

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.)

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

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

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?

I had no sympathy for drama queens.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

I would have done anything to feel real again.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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