“Kids don't come with instructions. We all mess up. Raising a child is pure impromptu.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“You can only be strong for so long.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Replicas never have the ghosts. They're bodies without souls.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Space. Jack said he needed space. And that was all wrong. Never mind that “needing space” was one of those lame, cloying, namby-pamby, New Age we-are-the-world terms that was worse than meaningless—“needing space”—a terrible euphemism for “I’m soooo outta here.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“They would claim that she was either delusional or naïve to the point of a learning disability.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“The door opened. Mrs. Alworth wore a housedress that couldn’t have been manufactured after the Bay of Pigs. She was in her mid-seventies, heavyset, the kind of big aunt who hugs you and you disappear in the folds. As a kid you hate the hug. As an adult you long for it. She had varicose veins that resembled sausage casing. Her reading glasses dangled against her enormous chest from a chain. She smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“The reception area of Burton and Crimstein was part old-world attorney—rich mahogany, lush carpeting, tapestry-clad seating, the décor that foreshadows the billing—and part Sardi’s celebrity wall.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Wu liked daytime TV. He enjoyed watching shows like Springer and Ricki Lake. Most people poo-pooed them. Wu did not. Only a truly great society, a free one, could allow such nonsense to air.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Didn’t you used to date a guy who worked in e-mail spam?” Grace asked. “Yep,” Cora said. “Obsessive creep named—get this—Gus. Hard to get rid of. I had to use my own version of a bunker buster on him.” “What did you do?” “I told Gus he had a small wee-wee.” “Ouch.” “Like I said, the bunker buster. Works every time, but there’s often, uh, collateral damage.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“The danger of video games was that they shut the world out. The beauty of video games was that they shut the world out. Sally”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Where’s Vickie?” Vickie was Cora’s daughter. “She’s spending the night at the McMansion with my ex and his horse-faced wife. Or as I prefer to put it, she’s spending the night in the bunker with Adolf and Eva.” Grace”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Scott Duncan sat across from the killer. The windowless room of thundercloud gray was awkward and still, stuck in that lull when the music first starts and neither stranger is sure how to begin the dance. Scott tried a noncommittal nod. The killer, decked out in prison-issue orange, simply stared. Scott folded his hands and put them on the metal table. The killer—his file said he was Monte Scanlon, but there was no way that was his real name—might have done likewise had his hands not been cuffed. Why,”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Scott glanced around the room. Besides Scanlon and himself, four people were present. Linda Morgan, the United States attorney, leaned against the back wall trying to give off the ease of Sinatra against a lamppost.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Sally Li had her feet on the desk, her hands behind her head. “Look, Scott, you want me to go through the rigmarole of how amazing the science of pathology has become, or do you want me to bottom-line it?” “Skip the rigmarole.” “At the time of her death, your sister was pregnant.” Duncan”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Scanlon’s lawyer, a ferret reeking of checkout-counter cologne, rounded out the group.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Part of Scott wanted to wiggle his fingers in Scanlon’s face and say, “Ooooo.” He was used to the captured criminal mindset—their serpentine maneuverings, their quest for an edge, their search for a way out, their overblown sense of importance. Linda Morgan, perhaps sensing his thoughts, shot a warning glare across his bow. Monte Scanlon, she’d told him, had worked for various connected families for the better part of thirty years. RICO hungered for his cooperation in a starving-man-near-a-buffet way. Since his capture, Scanlon had refused to talk. Until this morning. So”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“She had always been fervently anti-gun. Like most rational people she was scared of what a weapon like this could do lying around the house. But Cram had put it succinctly yesterday: Hadn’t her children been threatened? The trump card. Grace”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“She ate in silence, feeling as lonely as she had ever felt, and tried to hold herself together. What had happened? The day before yesterday—was it really only then?—she had picked up photographs at Photomat. That was all. Life was good. She had a husband she adored and two wonderful, inquisitive kids. She had time to paint. They all had their health, enough money in the bank. And then she had seen a photograph, an old one, and now . . . Grace had almost forgotten about Josh the Fuzz Pellet. He”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“While waiting for Carl Vespa to arrive, Grace started picking up the bedroom. Jack, she knew, was a great husband and father. He was smart, funny, loving, caring, and devoted. To counter that, God had blessed him with the organization skills of a citrus beverage. He was, in sum, a slob. Nagging him about it—and Grace had tried—did no good. So she stopped. If living happily was about compromise, this seemed to her like a pretty good one to make. Grace”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Emma wouldn’t wear anything the least bit feminine. Putting on a dress usually required a negotiation of Middle East sensitivity, with often an equally violent result.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“When she got back to the house, Cora was awake and at the computer and groaning. “Can I get you something?” Grace asked. “An anesthesiologist,” Cora said. “Straight preferred but not required.” “I was thinking more like coffee.” “Even better.” Cora’s fingers danced across the keyboard. Her eyes narrowed. She frowned. “Something’s wrong here.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“In the movies, killers are omnipotent.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“In the movies, killers are omnipotent. In real life, they are not. They don’t escape from handcuffs in the middle of a high-security federal penitentiary.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Granted this was a tenuous connection at best. Saying “Ford Windstar” in this suburb was like saying “implant” at a strip club.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Jack bought it for $6.99 at T.J. Maxx, a discount clothing store where hip goes to die.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“The room was immaculate—no, preserved. Stuck in a time warp, unused, untouched.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“The huge neon sign listed a church affiliation that Grace had never heard of. The motto, according to several signs around the edifice, seemed to indicate that this was “God’s House.” If that were true, God could use a more creative architect. The structure held all the splendor and warmth of a highway mega-store. The”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“What are you doing?” Grace had asked him. “Gangsta poses. Yo, whatchya think?” “That I should get you seizure medication.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“Grace nodded. She was trying to unearth the woman’s name, but it wouldn’t surface. The woman’s daughter—Blake, was it?—was in Grace’s son’s class in first grade. Or maybe it was last year in kindergarten. Hard to keep track. Grace kept the smile frozen to her face. The woman was nice enough, but she blended in with the others. Grace wondered, not for the first time, if she was blending in too, if her once great individuality had joined the unpleasant swirl of suburban uniformity. The”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
“She rose. Lindsey was pretty in a way that only the young are, with that enthusiasm and smile that belong exclusively to the innocent or the cult recruiter.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Just One Look
Harlan Coben
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
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“strange thing about her is that she sometimes draws the future. Only her brother Logan, fighting his cancer diagnosis, knows what she can do. But when a stranger named Ethan appears, determined to protect Caspia and her brother from dangers he won’t explain, she’s not sure what to think. Strangers almost never come to Whitfield. They certainly don’t follow her around, frightening her one moment and treating her like glass the next. And they certainly don’t look exactly like the subject of her most violent drawing.”
― Jamie Ayres, quote from 18 Things
“This is my daily work . . . When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day. Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed. Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
“He was afraid of the world, afraid it would find a way to swallow him up. But, maybe everyone was sometimes.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Highly Illogical Behavior
“No one is normal. Everyone is just pretending to be normal.”
― A.R. Torre, quote from The Girl in 6E
“The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
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