Top 100 Lisa Unger Quotes
#1. That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most
Lisa Unger
#2. Love accepts. Forgiveness comes in time.
Lisa Unger
#3. Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
Lisa Unger
#4. Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping.
Lisa Unger
#5. Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.
Lisa Unger
#6. I think that's the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we've made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions.
Lisa Unger
#7. Eloise knew that it was so much more complicated than that. There are no trades in this life, and depression is a dark, dark doorway some people have no choice but to walk through.
Lisa Unger
#8. For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.
Lisa Unger
#9. In my research about the patient-therapist relationship, as well as the particular
Lisa Unger
#10. Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma.
Lisa Unger
#11. Or she could listen to that other voice, the voice that wasn't a voice but something so deep, so indivisible from her own consciousness that it didn't have sound.
Lisa Unger
#12. In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did.
Lisa Unger
#13. Choices turned to consequences, opinions turned to judgments, and admiration turned to envy. Envy curdled everything, like lemon in milk.
Lisa Unger
#14. Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. - John Milton, Paradise Lost
Lisa Unger
#15. Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.
Lisa Unger
#16. Some bolts and then a door opened onto Eleventh
Lisa Unger
#17. You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.
Lisa Unger
#18. Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another.
Lisa Unger
#19. People who stay in the same town with the same friends for their entire lives never get a chance to find out who they can really be, because they will always be considered as who they were.
Lisa Unger
#20. You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that? The
Lisa Unger
#21. An awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world.
Lisa Unger
#22. You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.
Lisa Unger
#23. But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.
Lisa Unger
#24. He's dead, Annie. But as long as you haven't dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he'll live on. We'll always have to face these times when you think he's returned for you. You'll never be free." It
Lisa Unger
#25. When they're small, they're part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want them to feel safe and free to explore the world, you have to let them go. Mostly.
Lisa Unger
#26. We can't hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.
Lisa Unger
#27. What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.
Lisa Unger
#28. You cannot hope for change in others, you can only work toward it in yourself. And that's hard work.
Lisa Unger
#29. We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones
Lisa Unger
#31. She'd spun a web around Maggie's son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There
Lisa Unger
#32. I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
Lisa Unger
#33. It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.
Lisa Unger
#34. Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it.
Lisa Unger
#35. Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator?
Lisa Unger
#36. Judgment is such a useful shield, isn't it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate.
Lisa Unger
#37. Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case - once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be.
Lisa Unger
#38. Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.
Lisa Unger
#39. Bored people looked for drama and caused trouble.
Lisa Unger
#40. Fear holds on. Love lets go. "Yes,
Lisa Unger
#41. You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you'll always hear them calling your name.
Lisa Unger
#42. As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.
Lisa Unger
#43. But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.
Lisa Unger
#44. I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.
Lisa Unger
#45. It was human nature to see only what you want to see, and nothing would change that, no matter what tools people had at their disposal. The truth is only what you think it is.
Lisa Unger
#46. Ah, gym class. Remember it? Institutionally sanctioned torture for society's misfits.
Lisa Unger
#47. Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer.
Lisa Unger
#48. What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn't mean that you're saying it's all right now, or that you've forgotten the wrong. It just means that you've drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn't hurt as much. That's all.
Lisa Unger
#49. 'In Cold Blood' is not a thriller at all, really. It is, however, the first work of its kind: a true crime book that reads like fiction.
Lisa Unger
#50. Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)
Lisa Unger
#51. IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.
Lisa Unger
#52. It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.
Lisa Unger
#53. I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again - rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself.
Lisa Unger
#54. It was the dawn of a new day that Birdie prized. It was God's little reminder that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises.
Lisa Unger
#55. Eloise thought that justice was a funny thing. It was a big idea, a romantic one. It was imagined like a satisfying end to a story.
Lisa Unger
#56. I'm a 'bound book' kind of girl. I have a Kindle, and I enjoy it for some things, like convenience or instant gratification, or all the little things that you can do with them.
Lisa Unger
#57. The truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again.
Lisa Unger
#58. He didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed.
Lisa Unger
#59. People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice.
Lisa Unger
#60. The years grew over that embrace like a vine.
Lisa Unger
#61. But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.
Lisa Unger
#62. In the end it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them-that's where you have control over your life.
Lisa Unger
#63. The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn't it?
Lisa Unger
#64. Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul - often just the opposite.
Lisa Unger
#65. Love, a promise delivered already broken.
Lisa Unger
#66. The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
Lisa Unger
#67. Anyone who used the word hip probably wasn't.
Lisa Unger
#68. It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.
Lisa Unger
#69. I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.
Lisa Unger
#70. Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease.
Lisa Unger
#71. He'd been raised to give women what they wanted. 'You can fight,' his father told him. 'You can bitch. If you're a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul ... just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars.' The old man was right about that.
Lisa Unger
#72. Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.
Lisa Unger
#73. Not that she didn't about fighting losing battles.
Lisa Unger
#74. There's a village in my computer - friends, fans, readers, and colleagues. It's a populous, sometimes chaotic little burg always bustling with news, gossip, opinions and potential excitement.
Lisa Unger
#75. Adopt the pace of nature, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her secret is patience. Ray
Lisa Unger
#76. But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel
Lisa Unger
#77. I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people.
Lisa Unger
#78. Isn't it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on?
Lisa Unger
#79. It must be the ultimate punishment, don't you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?
Lisa Unger
#80. I read 'Rebecca' when I was a teenager and was swept away by the powerful voice, the gut wrenching suspense and the dark, twisted love story at its center.
Lisa Unger
#81. In their predictable lives, where everything
Lisa Unger
#82. Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn't mean you are shit. You can make something of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place. - Jake quoting his mentor, Arnie Coel
Lisa Unger
#83. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised - yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details.
Lisa Unger
#84. It sounded to him like the noise of too many mouths that talk and too few minds that think.
Lisa Unger
#85. Denial: my family heritage. If you don't ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you.
Lisa Unger
#86. The Universe doesn't like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it.
Lisa Unger
#88. I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles.
Lisa Unger
#89. Grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.
Lisa Unger
#90. Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers.
Lisa Unger
#92. Let's love our girls well and protect their spirits, Introduce them to their own strength and power, and Keep them as bright and beautiful as the day they were born.
Lisa Unger
#93. The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.
Lisa Unger
#94. ... there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went.
Lisa Unger
#95. When you're young it's easy to confuse passion for love.
Lisa Unger
#96. I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection.
Lisa Unger
#97. When we put on clothes, we're telling ourselves something, and we're communicating that something to every person we meet.
Lisa Unger
#98. Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.
Lisa Unger
#99. As far as Eloise was concerned, there were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.
Lisa Unger
#100. Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.
Lisa Unger
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