Gillian Flynn
A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.Collection: Anger
The funny thing, I guess, is that my husband ended up being the muse of a book about the worst marriage in the world, because if he hadn't consistently said, 'Don't censor yourself, don't worry about me' - if he'd been anxious and worried about it - then it would never have gotten written.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Imagination
Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.Collection: Awful
The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.Collection: Giving
The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.Collection: Humanity
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.Collection: Real
Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptoniteCollection: Kryptonite
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.'Collection: Rocks
Problems always start long before you really, really see them.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Mother
Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.Collection: Beautiful
Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.Collection: Pain
Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Night
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.Collection: People
I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.Collection: Crush
To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.Collection: Dream
I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.Collection: Inspirational
There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.Collection: Memories
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.)Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Real
Don't be discouraged - every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.Collection: Discouraged
To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way.Collection: Pain
It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.Collection: Trying
To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.Collection: Mystery
There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.Collection: Love
The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.Collection: Lying
It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.Collection: Humbling
Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.Collection: Worry
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?Collection: Simple
There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Pain
I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.Collection: Way
There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.Collection: Writing
I had no sympathy for drama queens.Collection: Queens
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.Collection: Thinking
A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.Collection: Children
I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.Collection: Ends
Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.Collection: Mean
How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?Collection: Sky
She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.Collection: Compliment
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.Collection: Body
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Yellow
People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Mom
Everytime people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.Collection: Clothes