Quotes from Harlan Coben

Another weird thing about funerals: Wear black but kill something as colorful as flowers to decorate.

Most religious people don't believe the dogma, Ash. We take from it what we want, we discard what we don't. We form whatever narrative we like—kind God, vengeful God, active God, laid-back God, whatever. We just make sure we get something out of it. Maybe we get life everlasting while people we resent burn for eternity. Maybe we get something more concrete—money, a job, friends. You just change the narrative.

But if Frank had wanted Pavel dead, he would have had Aaron do it. Pavel had been murdered between midnight and one. Aaron was dead by midnight. Myron mulled this over a bit and decided that Aaron's being dead made it extremely unlikely he was the killer.

I read Parker's Spenser series in college. When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he's an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.

maybe it was because the lonely can sometimes sense the lonely.

Check out the comments underneath," Augie says. I move the cursor down. "There are over fifty thousand of them." "Just click 'Top Comments' and read a few." I do as he asks. And as always when reading a comments section, my faith in humanity plummets:

When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.

We have something in common now." Augie looks a question at him. "Well, something horrible," Tom continues. "We've both lost children. I know your pain now. It's like . . . it's like being members of the worst club imaginable.

Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.

The missing girl—there 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's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious, then a quick cut to the worried parents on the front lawn, microphones surrounding them, Mom silently tearful, Dad reading a statement with quivering lip—that girl, that missing girl had just walked past Edna Skylar.

We pay attention to what works with our narrative. We tend to dismiss that which does not.

The old saw about bad news traveling fast has never been truer than in the age of the Internet.

It was true what they said: The older you become, the more you are like your parents. Soon he'd be telling a kid not to stick his elbow out the car window or he'd lose it.

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

Terrific, Simon said. The psychos are on my side.

The eyebrows were his most prominent feature—unusually thick and angry and constantly undulating

But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school—where is she now? It didn't happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation. So

They would claim that she was either delusional or naïve to the point of a learning disability.

They take in the full experience of great loves and great tragedies without backing down or crouching into some sort of defensive stance. If life is going to punch them in the face, they stick their chins out and savor the moment. That is living life to the fullest.

boy is getting all Ds and Fs in math so his parents send him to Catholic school. On his first report card, his parents are shocked to see their son getting straight As. When his parents ask him why, he says, "Well, when I went into the chapel and saw that guy nailed to a plus sign, I knew they were serious.

people believe any crackpot conspiracy they see online.

What we so admire and call single minded dedication was really obsessive self-involvement. What in that exactly is admirable?

We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray.

The pain flooded in again. It was always there, of course. Through the shaking hands and slapping of the backs, the grief stayed by his side, tapping Griffin on the shoulder, whispering in his ear, reminding him that they were partners for life.