Quotes from Deal Breaker

Harlan Coben ·  339 pages

Rating: (36.6K votes)


“Myron reached for the phone and dialed Win's number. After the eighth ring he began to hang up when a weak, distant voice coughed. "Hello?"
Win?"
Yeah."
You okay?"
Hello?"
Win?"
Yeah."
What took you so long to answer the phone?"
Hello?"
Win?"
Who is this?"
Myron."
Myron Bolitar?"
How many other Myrons do you know?"
Myron Bolitar?"
No, Myron Rockefeller."
Something's wrong," Win said.
What?"
Terribly wrong."
What are you talking about?"
Some asshole is calling me at seven in the morning pretending to be my best friend."
Sorry, I forgot the time.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You're really cute."
"I don't have any money."
She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker



“that looked like something out of an”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“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.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“An awkward impasse. No one knew exactly how to say good-bye. A wave? A handshake? A kiss?”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


“Whores hung out the windows like shreds of leftover Christmas decorations.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Deal Breaker


About the author

Harlan Coben
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self
because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a
great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away,
of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate
something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man


“In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless


“Well, you look like something the cat dragged in,” he remarked, immediately laying a hand on the warrior’s forehead and closing his eyes in order to assess the damage done to the warrior’s abused body.
Gideon did not understand why Elijah found his remark so terribly funny, but the warrior was laughing so hard that his nurse pinched him in the arm to stop him.
“I can’t keep pressure with your chest bobbing up and down. Besides, Gideon will never be that funny,” she said, giving him a cockeyed look.”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Elijah


“[...] leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing impossible to capture.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Laughter in the Dark


“Still, experience has taught me that knowing one's enemy is key to winning any battle.”
― Michelle Zink, quote from Guardian of the Gate


Interesting books

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
(45.4K)
Even Cowgirls Get th...
by Tom Robbins
The Sword of Shannara
(71.7K)
The Sword of Shannar...
by Terry Brooks
Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back
(246.3K)
Heaven is for Real:...
by Todd Burpo
Wallbanger
(151K)
Wallbanger
by Alice Clayton
The Selfish Gene
(106.2K)
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Girl, Interrupted
(157.9K)
Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.