Top 100 Harlan Coben Quotes
#1. If you like Harlan Coben, you'll love Linwood Barclay.
Peter Robinson
#2. Michael Connelly's Series Order Diana Gabaldon's Series Order Patricia Cornwell's Series Order Fern Michael's Series Order Robert Ludlum's Series Order Harlan Coben's Series Order Terry Pratchett's Series Order J.A. Jance's Series Order Tom Clancy's
A.J. Stone
#3. Mental illnesses are so strange. A physical problem we can understand. But when the mind works irrationally, well, by its very definition, the rational mind cannot truly relate.
Harlan Coben
#4. The grease from the awful lunch buffet took to the air, becoming more a skin coating than a smell.
Harlan Coben
#5. Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.
Harlan Coben
#6. The phone rang. Joan Rochester leaped to her feet, but Dominick signaled her to sit with a wave of his hand. He wiped his face as though it were a windshield and rose from his seat. Dominick was a thick man. Not fat. Thick. Thick neck, thick shoulders, thick chest, thick arms and thighs. The
Harlan Coben
#7. They're politicians,' Win said. 'They'd lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.
Harlan Coben
#8. Obsession does not seek out problems and correct them; it manufactures them out of nothing, feeds them, makes them stronger.
Harlan Coben
#9. Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.
Harlan Coben
#10. We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don't put it in those terms. But we do.
Harlan Coben
#11. chances. I want to make sure that Dan Mercer never hurts anyone ever again." "By killing
Harlan Coben
#12. Some men carry torches for old loves, and then some guys - not many, but some - get completely consumed by the torch's flames. It makes them nothing but long-term trouble for the follow-ups.
Harlan Coben
#13. The receptionist at Horne, Buckman and Pierce, a classic battle-ax who was comfortably past her prime, eyed Loren as if she'd recognized her from a sex offender poster. Full frown in place, the battle-ax told her to sit. Randal
Harlan Coben
#14. Dreams never die. Sometimes you think they are dead, but they are just hibernating lie some old bear. And, if the dream has been hibernating for a long time, that bear is going to wake up grumpy and hungry
Harlan Coben
#15. The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.
Harlan Coben
#16. This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.
Harlan Coben
#17. We don't pray in foxholes because we are ready to meet our Maker. We pray because we don't want to.
Harlan Coben
#18. Tia is too overprotective. You know that." Mike put down his cell phone. "Adam quit the hockey team." Mo made a face as if Mike had suggested that his son had gotten into devil worship or bestiality. "Whoa." Mike
Harlan Coben
#19. Some people are drawn to trouble. Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up.
Harlan Coben
#20. Death sucks. Death sucks, mostly because it forces those who stay behind to survive. Death isn't merciful enough to take you too. Instead, death constantly jams down your throat the awful lesson that life does indeed go on, no matter what.
Harlan Coben
#21. Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.
Harlan Coben
#22. Manhattan scene - you are surrounded and yet you find solace; you find isolation in the tornado of people.
Harlan Coben
#23. The rule of thumb in student files seemed to be, If you have nothing negative to say, don't say anything at all.
Harlan Coben
#24. But, alas, that was crap. She'd been had by a con man - simple as that. His modesty had been a way to cover up his true self. Call it instinct or women's intuition or going with your gut - whenever Wendy had done that, she had been wrong. "I
Harlan Coben
#25. Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.
Harlan Coben
#26. I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.
Harlan Coben
#27. So now what? Kick down the door . . . and then what? Find an old lady in a weird white dress and demand she explain her whack-a-doodle rants? Maybe she had gone upstairs. Maybe Bat Lady was now getting ready for her loony day, changing out of her white dress, heading to the shower . . . Ugh.
Harlan Coben
#28. Right now, even though he'd been dead for years, she wanted to collapse in her father's big arms and hear him tell her that everything would be all right. Do we ever outgrow that need?
Harlan Coben
#29. By the time Myron was forced to return, their clients were scattering into the night like kitchen help during an immigration bust.
Harlan Coben
#30. You stay in the surreal world of so-called higher learning. You are comfortable there. You have very little reason to leave it.
Harlan Coben
#31. I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.
Harlan Coben
#32. Why do humans never really learn the lessons we are supposed to? What is in our makeup, in fact, that draws us to that which should sicken us?
Harlan Coben
#33. It be nicer to think your parents, who worked hard, gave you those presents instead of some creepy stranger?
Harlan Coben
#34. After three rings the machine picked up. Win's annoyingly superior accent said, "Hang up without leaving a message and die." Beep. Myron shook his head, smiled, and, as always, left a message. He
Harlan Coben
#35. An old Croatian proverb Adam had learned in college applied here: The hunchback sees the hump of others - never his own.
Harlan Coben
#36. At one time, this might have been a nice area, but now the neighborhood looked like a man who'd lost his job and stopped bathing.
Harlan Coben
#37. The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.
Harlan Coben
#38. Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.
Harlan Coben
#39. The two Crabfest eaters pulled out bills one at a time. Then they each opened their change purse as though it were a rusted chastity belt. Heidi
Harlan Coben
#40. And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.
Harlan Coben
#41. As a soldier, you don't stand at attention because it looks nice. You stand at attention because, on some level, it either gives you strength or, just as important, makes you appear stronger to both your comrades and enemies.
Harlan Coben
#42. This was life though, wasn't it? Death made you crave life. The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes.
Harlan Coben
#43. This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.
Harlan Coben
#44. So basically, that entire theory is blown to hell."
Not basically," Win corrected. "Entirely.
Harlan Coben
#45. He checked his watch. "One more drink," Win said. "And then I will go in the other room because - oh, you'll love this - Mee so horny." I
Harlan Coben
#46. Sure, okay, enjoy World Book Day but celebrating reading one day a year is like "getting some" only on Valentine's Day.
Harlan Coben
#47. I'm 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.
Harlan Coben
#48. A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.
Harlan Coben
#49. The humpback never sees the hump on his own back.
Harlan Coben
#50. You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.
Harlan Coben
#51. Another weird thing about funerals: Wear black but kill something as colorful as flowers to decorate.
Harlan Coben
#52. Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.
Harlan Coben
#53. Jared was her son and the "co-general manager" of the Yankees - co meaning shares the title with someone who knows what he's doing because he got the job through nepotism.
Harlan Coben
#54. More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key.
Harlan Coben
#55. Logan's overall score was a six-point-seven. Jimmy only has a score of six-point-four. Even with today's new math, six-point-seven is greater than six-point-four. I can show you with a graph if that would help.
Harlan Coben
#56. I found something in Mercer's room," Walker said in a voice as gray as a tombstone. "I think it belongs to Haley McWaid.
Harlan Coben
#57. It's just that . . . when you have kids, it just changes things." "Do me a favor, Yates. Please don't give me that having-children-alters-you spiel. I listen to that crap enough from my painfully few friends.
Harlan Coben
#58. Maybe the answer isn't in another job," Wendy said. "Maybe the answer is in finding new ways to define manhood.
Harlan Coben
#59. No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.
Harlan Coben
#60. The sun shone through the green of the trees. The sky was a blue only a deity could paint. Beauty always found refuge in the ugly. Truth be told, beauty couldn't really exist without the ugly. How can there be light if there is no dark? Gerard
Harlan Coben
#61. We all want to convince ourselves that it is about hard work and education and perseverance, but the truth is, life is much more about the fickle and the random. We don't want to admit it, but we are controlled by luck, by timing, by fate.
Harlan Coben
#62. Ambition is natural when you don't have anything. You know what you're driving for.
Harlan Coben
#63. I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?
Harlan Coben
#64. It was one lesson he never forgot.You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted.And you don't act like the goverment with their "proportional responses" and all that nonsense.If someone hurts you,mercy and pity must be put aside,You eliminate the enemy.You scorch the earth.
Harlan Coben
#65. That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.
Harlan Coben
#66. Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy
Harlan Coben
#67. Violence doesn't solve anything. Win would make a face when I said that, but the truth was, whenever I resorted to violence, it never just ended there. Violence ripples and reverberates. It echoes and really never seems to go silent.
Harlan Coben
#68. He truly believed that no one could love him, and no matter who you are, that hurts. It made you insecure. It made you want to hide and build fences
Harlan Coben
#69. Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something
Harlan Coben
#70. Hope she's not getting Gloria." "Why?" "She kinda looks like a white version of me," Jake said. "Only with a heavier beard.
Harlan Coben
#71. With everyone else, you put up this facade so you can hide the crud and make them like you. But with real friends, you show them the crud-and that makes them care. When we get rid of the facade, we connect more.
Harlan Coben
#72. God, she loved this kid. Wendy had one of those waves, the ones that sneak up on parents and crush them and make them just want to wrap their arms around their kid and never let him go.
Harlan Coben
#73. Sports were supposed to be a reflection of life, a life lesson, a test of endurance and strength, a great preparation for the real world.
Harlan Coben
#74. Regrets and could-have-beens tried to sneak in, but he shoved them away. No time for this now.
Harlan Coben
#75. Esperanza's side had so many colors, Crayola sent a scout.
Harlan Coben
#76. He stared at Ryan and felt that overwhelming feeling he sometimes got when he looked at his boys - part pure joy, part fear of what could happen to them in this cruel world, part wishes and hopes, all blended together in the only thing in this entire planet that felt completely pure.
Harlan Coben
#77. In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
Harlan Coben
#78. Most of the blood - nearly all of it, really - belonged to the victim, Rick Collins," Berleand said. His voice was measured now, as if he were trying to wade his way through whatever he was about to tell us. "That's hardly a surprise." We
Harlan Coben
#79. A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You're really cute."
"I don't have any money."
She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.
Harlan Coben
#80. It's important to like what you're doing. Choosing a profession is the most important decision you'll ever make - more important even than choosing a spouse.
Harlan Coben
#81. Its funny how you can let yourself forget for seconds, how even in the heat of the horrible, you can have moments when you fool yourself into thinking it might all be okay
Harlan Coben
#82. Matt rested his head against the bus window, the vibration working like a strange massage.
Harlan Coben
#83. That's the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song
Harlan Coben
#84. In most relationships, one partner has more control than the other. It was just the natural order of things. Perfect balance was a hard thing to find.
Harlan Coben
#85. Your fellow soldiers had to know that you had their back. That was rule one, lesson one, and above all else. If the enemy goes after you, he goes after me too.
Harlan Coben
#87. 'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.
Harlan Coben
#88. She had trouble simply enjoying and letting be. She liked to correct and make right.
Harlan Coben
#89. All around her, children and families played and laughed and reveled in the glory of this seemingly ordinary day. They did so without fear or care because they didn't get it. They all played and they all laughed and they felt so damn safe. They didn't see how fragile it all was.
Harlan Coben
#90. Grief is devastating, all-consuming. But grief merely visits friends, even the closest. It stays much longer, probably forever, with the family, but that was probably how it should be.
Harlan Coben
#91. There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.
Harlan Coben
#92. The sun was now in its death throes, bruising the sky a coiling purple and orange.
Harlan Coben
#93. I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.
Harlan Coben
#94. You want this so badly - this second chance, this chance at real redemption - that you can't see the truth." "What
Harlan Coben
#96. His world was wobbly but back on the axis.
Harlan Coben
#97. Shauna stalks into a room as though it offends her. She was a plus-size model, one of the few known by one name. Shauna. Like Cher or Fabio. She stood six one and weighed one hundred ninety pounds. She was, as you might expect, a head-turner, and all heads in the waiting room obliged. Shauna
Harlan Coben
#98. When Myron was ten years old, his father had taken him and his younger brother, Brad, to a game. Brad was five at the time. Dad had secured
Harlan Coben
#99. We move to the dance floor. We face each other. She puts one hand on my shoulder and the other hand in mine. We start to dance. At some point Ema moves closer. She rests her head on my shoulder.
I barely move. I barely breath.
I just want this moment to last.
Harlan Coben
#100. Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn't mean it's meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.
Harlan Coben
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