Quotes by Harlan Coben

“A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.”

“A friend once told Megan that we are always seventeen years old, waiting for our lives to begin. More than ever, clutching to this man, Megan understood that.”

“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. Ray Levine was one of those people.”

“Secrets...were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk.”

“There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. Something. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition. ...”

“An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.”

“Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, ...”

“The missing girlthere had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl'...”

“He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.”

“You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.”

“I'm not a big sports fan.”

“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'...”

“In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work o...”

“Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It's much too strict, but it's a hell of a teacher.”

“What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial...”

“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 d...”

“'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.”

“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.”

“The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and...”

“I kept glancing at her animated face, scrunched up as though imitating an adult. I got hit with that overwhelming feeling. It sneaked up on me. Parents get it from time to time. You are looking at ...”