Quotes from Michael Connelly

From the beginning, she had left a hole in my heart that could never quite heal. I could go years without seeing her but I could never stop thinking about her. Thinking about where she was, what she was doing, who she was with.

Shouldn't death be the relief from the tortures of life?

You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.

The important thing is to believe. Not to hope but to believe. There is a difference. I believe in these things and so that helps me do what I have to do and accomplish what it is I want to accomplish.

The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.

Because it's a hot door and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room.

It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city's history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

I'm going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who's still around and can look at this thing. Harry, you sure you-- You think I have a choice?

where there's government subsidy, there is always corruption.

one of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.

When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life.

Walls within walls, Bosch thought. He wondered what the owners did with all of their space besides fearfully guard it.

The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.

Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass.

We want the truth, Detective. You are confusing that with what we choose to tell the public.

He 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.

All these years in the straight life and she still had a whore's pride.

He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited.

So, what it's like, Terry? Being a father. ... It's like having a gun to your head all the time. Because I know if anything happens to her, anything, then my life is over.

Trust no one. You may be working with the last honest cop in Mexicali, but why bet your life on it?

All his life Bosch had lived and worked in society's institutions. But he hope he had escaped institutional thinking, that he made his own decisions.

You don't like what you see out your window, you put up a wall.

Fulgoni gave me a look that I interpreted as a warning that I was crossing into a territory that he had deemed off-limits when we had last discussed his testimony. I gave him a look back that said too fucking bad. I have you under oath. I own you.

I reached between the seats to the backseat, where her purse was on the floor. It was the size of a grocery bag and it weighed a ton. What the hell do you have in this thing? Everything. I didn't ask for further explanation. I managed to pull the bag up to the front seat, open it, and find her iPad. I put the bag on the floor between my feet, lest I pull a muscle leveraging it into the back again.