Quotes from Hold Tight

“Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Kids don’t do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“I used to wonder why Lucy liked those songs so much. You know what I mean? She sits in the dark and listens and cries. Music does that to her...I didn't understand for a long time. But I do now. The sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“They say possesions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn't that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you're moving slowly, not sure which direction you're heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don't realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give away, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“It was all so damn fragile, that was the thing. Obvious, for sure,but for the most part we block - we refuse to think about how easily our lives could be torn asunder, because when we recognize it, we lose our minds. The ones who are fearful all the time, who need to medicate to function? It is because they understand the reality, how thin the line is. It isn't that they can't accept the truth - its that they can't block it.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don't put it in those terms. But we do.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Why do humans never really learn the lessons we are supposed to? What is in our makeup, in fact, that draws us to that which should sicken us?”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“It was more about understanding that you could give it your all, give yourself the best chances, but control is an illusion.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Ambition is natural when you don't have anything. You know what you're driving for.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“The sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Bir kadın bir çift pahalı ayakkabı satın aldığında bu parayla açlıktan nefesi kokan birine yardım etmeyi düşünmez bile. … Rahat bir hayat süreceğiz diye hepimiz öldürürüz.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Well, if you did, you’d be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you’re still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you’re holding and still, still, our entire solar system—forget our planet—is smaller than that compared to the rest of the universe. Can you even comprehend how insignifi- cant we are?”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Most people assumed that it would be the opposite—that the victim of such horrific violence would naturally be repulsed by any future bloodshed. But the truth was, the world does not work that way. Violence breeds violence—but not just in the obvious, retaliatory way. The molested child grows up to become the adult molester. The son traumatized by his father abusing his mother is far more likely to one day beat his own wife. Why? Why do we humans never really learn the lessons we are supposed to? What is in our makeup, in fact, that draws us to that which should sicken us?”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Someone is always worse off than you. That never seemed like much comfort.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“But see, feminism isn’t about helping a fellow sister. It’s about an equal playing field. It’s about giving women choices, not guarantees.” Tia”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“But forget that for a moment,” Nash went on, “because man is even insignificant here on this very planet. Let’s take this whole argument down to just earth for a moment, okay?” She nodded. “Do you realize that dinosaurs walked this planet longer than man?” “Yes.” “But that’s not all. That would be one thing that would show that man is not special—the fact that even on this infinitesimally small planet we haven’t even been kings the majority of the time. But take it a step farther—do you realize how much longer the dinosaurs ruled the earth than us? Two times? Five times? Ten times?” She looked at him. “I don’t know.” “Forty-four thousand times longer.” He was gesturing wildly now, lost in the bliss of his argument. “Think about that. Forty-four thousand times longer. That’s more than one hundred and twenty years for every single day. Can you even comprehend it? Do you think we will survive forty-four thousand times longer than we already have?” “No,”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“There was in him some primitive instinct to protect his parents and siblings, but the rest of the world’s inhabitants did not matter to him. They were background scenery, props, nothing more. The truth was—a truth he understood early—he derived intense pleasure from harming others. He always had. He didn’t know why. Some people derive pleasure from a soft breeze or a warm hug or a victory shot in a basketball game. Nash derived it from ridding the planet of another inhabitant. He didn’t ask this for himself, but he saw it and sometimes he could fight it and sometimes he could not. Then”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Before that night, Susan Loriman had not been a religious person. Growing up, her parents had taken her to church every Sunday, but it never stuck. When she began to blossom into what many considered a beauty, her parents kept a stern eye. Eventually Susan rebelled, of course, but that horrible night sent her back to the fold. She”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“I didn’t know people like this really existed,” Muse said. But she did. She saw them at Starbucks, the harried, doe-eyed women who thought a coffee shop was the perfect place for Mommy and Me hour, what with Brittany and Madison and Kyle in tow, all running around while the mommies—college graduates, former intellectuals—gabbed incessantly about their offspring as if no other child had ever existed. They gabbed about their poopies—yes, for real, their bowel movements!—and their first word and their social skills and their Montessori schools and their gymnastics and their Baby Einstein DVDs and they all had this brain-gone smile, like some alien had sucked their head dry, and Muse despised them on one level, pitied them on another and tried so damn hard not to be envious. Loren”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“If you look at anything from the outside, it is easy to make sweeping ungenerous judgments. “How”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Last night this street had been teeming with people. Now there was practically nobody. Those who were there either slept on a stoop or moved with amazing lethargy, legs congealed together, arms melted against their sides. Mike half expected a patch of tumbleweed to blow through the middle of the street. “You”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“A group of boys-cum-men shuffled by her office, all duded out in goth black accessorized with a variety of items in the chain-n-stud family. The pants had huge cuffs and you couldn’t see their shoes. “Hey,”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Brett told me you spy on him,” Hester said. Brett and his big mouth, she thought. Wonderful. “I monitor his online activity.” “You say tomato, I say tomahto.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“When Nash was ten, he asked his father what happens to us when we die. His father said that Shakespeare probably said it best, that death was “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” In sum, how can we know? The”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

“Reba hesitated. He could see it. A primal reaction—more a reflex. He was, after all, a stranger. We are trained by both biology and society to fear the stranger. But evolution has given us societal niceties too. They were in a public parking lot and he seemed like a nice man, a dad and all, and he had a car seat and, well, it would be rude to say no, wouldn’t it? These calculations all took mere seconds, no more than two or three, and in the end, politeness beat out survival. It often did. “Sure.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Hold Tight

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