“Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Things can always be said later, but things can never be unheard.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“War is never a meritocracy for the casualties.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“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.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“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”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“As a soldier, you don’t stand at attention because it looks nice. You stand at attention because, on some level, it either gives you strength or, just as important, makes you appear stronger to both your comrades and enemies.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“There was an awkwardness to him, a stoicism that most people, with their need for appearances and fake smiles, found off-putting. Shane couldn’t handle small talk or the excess bullshittery of modern society. When”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“They say you never know how someone will react when the grenade is thrown.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Death is so close, always, a breath away, so perhaps it was wise to introduce children to that concept at an early age. Maya”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Family and money is never a good mix. Someone is always going to feel resentful.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Relationships and marriages are hard enough, but you add war into the mix and small fissures become gaping wounds. No one sees what you’re seeing—again that clear-eyed, unbiased thing—except your fellow soldiers. It’s like one of those movies where only the hero can see the ghosts and everyone else thinks the hero is crazy. In”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“All around her, children and families played and laughed and reveled in the glory of this seemingly ordinary day. They did so without fear or care because they didn’t get it. They all played and they all laughed and they felt so damn safe. They didn’t see how fragile it all was.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Death is so close, always, a breath away, so perhaps it was wise to introduce children to that concept at an early age. Maya filled her head with inanities like this as she watched Joe’s casket disappear into the earth. Distract yourself. That was the key. Get through it. The black dress itched. Over the past decade, Maya had been to a hundred-plus funerals, but this was the first time she’d been obligated to wear black. She hated it. To”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“The company was in the short, hirsute form of NYPD homicide detective Roger Kierce.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Guys who lack confidence in so many ways still manage to delude themselves into thinking they are irresistible to all women.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“You said that Joe was slow to give up his wallet. Your husband also wore a very expensive watch. A Hublot, I believe.” Her”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“The Smith and Wesson was stainless steel, as opposed to black. Easy to see in the dark. I could also hear him pull back the hammer. You do that on a revolver, not a semiautomatic.” “And the Beretta?” “I can’t be sure of the exact make, but it had a floating barrel in the style of Beretta.” “As”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Maya knew that she suffered some textbook mental malady from being over there, but the truth is, no one comes back without scars. To her, that malady felt more like enlightenment. She got the world now. Others didn’t. In”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Coach Phil’s shorts probably fit him okay twenty, thirty pounds ago. His red polo shirt with the word “Coach” stitched in script across the left breast was also snug enough to double as sausage casing. He had the look of an ex-jock gone to seed, which, Maya surmised, he probably was. He was big and intimidating, and his size probably scared people. Keeping”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“I checked the league rules,” Maya said. “I don’t see an exception to the half-game rule. You also didn’t play all your players in the quarterfinals.” He turned toward her and again faced her full-on. He adjusted the brim of his cap and moved into Maya’s personal space. She didn’t step back. During the first half, sitting with the parents and watching the guy’s constant tirades at both the girls and the refs, Maya had seen him slam-dunk that stupid cap onto the ground twice. He’d looked like a two-year-old midparoxysm. “We”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“From the left—the kitchen—someone stepped into view.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“You can participate or you can protect, but you really can’t do both. Her fellow soldiers would understand. Some might force themselves to cross over.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Maya had learned it in the military, but of course, it applied to real life. Your fellow soldiers had to know that you had their back. That was rule one, lesson one, and above all else. If the enemy goes after you, he goes after me too. Maybe”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“What do you think of it?” Claire had asked her then. “It’s a dump.” Claire had smiled. “Exactly, thank you. Just watch.” Maya had no creativity for such things. She could not see the potential. Claire could. She had that kind of touch. Soon the two words that came to mind when you pulled up to the home were “cheerful” and “homey.” The whole place ended up looking like a happy kid’s crayon drawing somehow, with the sun always shining and the flowers taller than the front door. That”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“She hung up. Camp Arifjan had served pizza as a choice at almost every meal, but the sauce tasted like turned ketchup and the dough had the consistency of toothpaste. Since she’d been home, she craved only thin-crust pizza and nobody did that better than Best of Everything. When”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
“Judith was a beautiful woman. She was petite with big round eyes and dainty, doll-like features. She looked younger than her years. There had been some work done—Botox, maybe a little something around the eyes—but it was tasteful, and most of her youthful appearance was due either to genetics or her daily yoga routine. Her figure still drew second glances. Men were drawn to her big-time—looks, brains, money—but if she dated, Maya didn’t know about it. “I”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Fool Me Once
Harlan Coben
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
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“A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.
The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol.
...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies
“Why is it their business? They expect me to go sit at their fucking picnic—alone—and watch them with their happy fucking little families, and I’m supposed to pretend like the one person in this town I give a damn about doesn’t even exist?” “Uh….” I couldn’t really think of anything to say to that. I couldn’t believe that he had said any of it and was pretty sure he wouldn’t have on any normal day. But it didn’t matter. He was still talking, and the pull on the back of my head had resumed.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises
“Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Alta
“You gotta fish or cut bait,man.This has gone on long enough. You're playing with fire, every damn time you walk in this bar.”
― Karen Rose, quote from I Can See You
“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
The Intern
The Children Act
A Whole New World
The Vanishing Throne
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