Quotes from Harlan Coben

Some things we pack away, stick in the back of the closet, never expect to see again ? but we can't quite make ourselves discard them. Like dreams, I guess.

Fame is more addictive than crack. Adults who lose fame--one-hit wonders, for example--usually tailspin into depression, though they try to act like they're above it. They don't want to admit the truth. Their whole life is a lie, a desperate scramble for another dose of that most potent of drugs. Fame

You have heart disease, people understand. When the brain gets sick, well, it's almost impossible to comprehend.

Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.

Myron remembered something his father once told him: People have an amazing capacity to mess up their own lives.

It's not the dead even. They're gone. Nothing you can do about that. It's what's left behind - the echo. These woods you're walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Billingham kid. I'm sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.

There was an old joke about being left on a deserted island with an editor. You are starving. All you have left is a glass of orange juice. Days pass. You are near death. You are about to drink the juice when the editor grabs the glass from your hand and pees into it. You look at him, stunned . There, the editor says, handing you the glass. It just needed a little tweaking.

The world doesn't give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn't the rest of us take notice? But no.

whenever I see a table of college "friends" sitting together they are inevitably texting with unseen others, searching, always searching, I guess, for something that might be better, a perpetual life hunt for digital greener grass, an attempt to smell roses that are elsewhere at the expense of the ones in front of you...

Life isn't lived in the black and white, Wilde. People like to think so nowadays. All the online outrage, things are either all good or all bad. But life is lived in the gray. Life is lived in the nuances.

Replicas never have the ghosts. They're bodies without souls.

Win's phone rang. He picked it up and said, "Articulate. Okay, put it through." Two seconds later he handed the phone to Myron. "For me?" Myron asked. Win gave him flat eyes. "No," he said. "I'm handing you the phone because it's too heavy for me." Everyone's a wiseass.

Relationships are never fifty-fifty. Sometimes they are sixty-forty, sometimes eighty-twenty. You'll be the eighty sometimes, you'll be the twenty others. The key is to accept and be okay with that.

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread.

I'd rather read than relax. I'd rather keep the mind engaged.

The humpback never sees the hump on his own back.

Ambition is natural when you don't have anything. You know what you're driving for.

One time Clu tried to explain it to me," Enos continued. "'Sometimes,' he said, 'you don't want to escape the world; sometimes you want to escape yourself.' " He cocked his head. "Do you believe that?" "Not really," Myron said. "Like a lot of cute phrases, it sounds good. But it also sounds like a load of self-rationalization.

I blinked and the images were gone. But I remembered how the laugh and the howl and the splash would ripple and echo in the stillness of our lake, and I wondered if ripples and echoes like those ever fully die away, if somewhere in the woods my father's joyful yelps still bounced quietly off the trees. Silly thought, but there you go.

Billy Joel was on the radio, singing, "I love you just the way you are." Big talk, Myron mused, when you've been married to Christie Brinkley.

There is silence, and then there is rural silence, silence you could feel and reach out and touch, silence with texture and distance.

When you're young you don't get how great it is to be loved unconditionally.

They - bliss and fear - are constant companions. Rarely does one venture out without the other.

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?