Gillian Flynn Quotes

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.

Rumors are spread by jealous people

I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall - something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.

Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.

A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.

The ones that hate you most tend to be the people you know

My town's quite small and you kinda recognize everyone when you see them, so I definitely get funny looks from people.

You know how gossip is. It's the toxic waste of small town

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.

Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

My town was even smaller. Only six hundred people. We didn't have a grocery store.

We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.

Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August. Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time…until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever. I mean, forever.

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

Calumny is the offspring of Envy.

Some people insist that "mediocre" is better than "best." They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.

I started to do everything I could to succeed, but found that the more successful I became, the less people liked me.

Gossip bespeaks either a vacant mind or one that entertains jealousy or envy.

Be careful about gossiping because loose lips really do sink ships. Now that I'm in the broadcast business, and people talk about me, I know what it feels like to be the victim of gossip.

People like to run their mouths.

"In Africa," S. B. once remarked, "if you do well, people close to you will hate you."

I feel like I am in a box of bees when I am in a room with lots of people and I'm just looking for the door. I find myself getting more and more agoraphobic as time goes on.

In such situations, of course, people don't nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that's the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer's delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn't be moaning.