Harlan Coben Quotes

I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it, and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away. I'm looking for the truth." And so it goes away. Puzzling.

Please. Forgive me. One more chance, Blaire. I want this. I want you.

People don't want to hear the truth; they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'

I was bad, but I was one of the kids that never got caught. If anyone ever knew I did something, it was because I told them. 'Cause I'm a really good liar, so I end up snitching on myself.

I myself have loved a lady and pursued her with a great deal of under-age protestation, whom some three or four gallants that have enjoyed would with all their hearts have been glad to have been rid of. 'Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.

Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.

I know my lies are always wishes.

She was yours, if you'd truly wanted her," Harry continued, a pitiless smile touching his lips. "But I wanted her more.

Truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you

Love was like rain: it turned into ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Live a lie, and you will live to regret it; that's what livin' is to me.

Girl I know it's real cause I've been around it. You only want what's real you just never found it

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.

All my lies are only wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new.

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?