Quotes from Michael Connelly

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more." ( "The Castle" )

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

I view people two ways. They're either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

You know you're going to get burned from time to time. It's just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they're about to snap the ball again.

There is no end of things in the heart. ...she understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

He [Harry Bosch] defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company

It's lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We'd all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top....

it is how a person goes about quenching his desires or living with them unrequited that the readers get a glimpse of his true character.

I'm relaxed, Belk. I call it Zen and the art of not giving a shit.

Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

The world was full of people who could not get over things. There was no closure and there was no peace. The truth did not set you free. But you could get through things. That's what Bosch would tell him. You could head toward the light and climb and dig and fight your way out of the hole.

There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.