Quotes from The Concrete Blonde

Michael Connelly ·  484 pages

Rating: (39.7K votes)


“If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“I'm relaxed, Belk. I call it Zen and the art of not giving a shit.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man’s eyes. It was an old California Craftsman with a full front porch and two dormer windows set on the long slope of the roof. But no light shone behind the glass, not even from above the doorway. Instead, the house cast a foreboding darkness about it that not even the glow from the streetlight could penetrate. A man could be standing there on the porch and Bosch knew he probably wouldn’t be able to see him. ‘You”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“That’s extortion,” Cerrone said. “No, asshole, that’s justice.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde



“The black heart does not beat alone.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you….”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“Nobody in this world is who they say they are. Nobody. Not when they’re in their own room with the door shut and locked. And nobody knows anybody, no matter what they think... The best you can hope for is to know yourself. And sometimes when you do, when you see your true self, you have to turn away.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“To think about failure was to invite failure.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“the best defense was a good lock or a mean dog. Or both.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde



“Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the [police] department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served. They only ventured out to deal with the dirtbags and consequently, Bosch knew, it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirtbag and was treated as such. Everybody.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“In the morning, Bosch sat on the rear deck of his house and watched the sun come up over the Cahuenga Pass. It burned away the morning fog and bathed the wildflowers on the hillside that had burned the winter before. He watched and smoked and drank coffee until the sound of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway became one uninterrupted hiss from the pass below.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


About the author

Michael Connelly
Born place: in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“I failed, he said, I got talking my ideas. It's my greatest failing.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The Ox-Bow Incident


“The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.”
― Frantz Fanon, quote from The Wretched of the Earth


“She looks at me as though she wants to both devour and strangle me. I chuckle softly. She’s fucking adorable.”
― Ashley Stoyanoff, quote from Two Truths and a Lie


“There's this ayah from the Quran that my dad always quotes when he sees something bad on TV. A fire or a flood or a bombing. "Whoever kills one person, it is as if he has killed all of mankind... And whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind." When I was a little kid, that always made me feel better. Because no matter how bad things get there are always people who rush in to help. And according to my dad they are blessed.”
― G. Willow Wilson, quote from Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal


“I never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake


Interesting books

Laddie: A True Blue Story
(3.5K)
Laddie: A True Blue...
by Gene Stratton-Porter
Scott Pilgrim, Volume 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
(30.5K)
Scott Pilgrim, Volum...
by Bryan Lee O'Malley
The Last Child
(28K)
The Last Child
by John Hart
Envy
(19.6K)
Envy
by J.R. Ward
Citizens of London: The Americans who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour
(5.8K)
Citizens of London:...
by Lynne Olson
The Warlord of Mars
(11.3K)
The Warlord of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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.