Quotes from Michael Connelly

What happens when you eat too much alphabet soup?" "What?" "You have a vowel movement.

Are you like him?" she asked. "Who?" "Timido. Alone out there in the dark world." "Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes.

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

It's a left-brain right-brain thing. People are more agreeable toward people on their left.

Big evil. There was no doubt that the same callous malignancy moved through the blood of the shooter here.

I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody's got one person out there. One bullet. And if you're lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you're shot through the heart, then there's nobody else. No matter what happens—death, divorce, infidelity, whatever—nobody else can ever come close. That's the single-bullet theory.

In this country, there are two million people in prison. Two million. If the system gets it wrong one percent of the time, that is twenty thousand innocent people in jail. Lower it to half a percent and you're still at ten thousand people. This is what keeps me up at night. Why I always say, the scariest client is the innocent man. Because there is so much at stake.

The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked.

Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.

The black heart does not beat alone.

You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.

don't worry, I'm not going to hold it against you when you end up wrong.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you….

Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.

Getting the quote right isn't what matters. It's remembering what it means.

Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client's favor. They weren't always the same thing.

In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty.

Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do.

Through studying the past we learn our future.

the most likely place that elected politicians ran afoul of the law was in the area of money.

But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort.

Ten years might as well be a hundred if you are doing time for a crime you didn't commit, he said.

Freeman was a damn good prosecutor but in my view she didn't play fair. A trial was supposed to be a spirited contesting of facts and evidence. Both sides with equal footing in the law and the rules of the game. But using the rules to hide or withhold facts and evidence was the routine with Freeman. She liked a tiled game. She didn't carry the light. She didn't even see the light.