“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
“Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
“Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”
― Charles Duhigg, quote from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
“I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Black Cat
“I don't say anything. I know the power of silence. I remember my dad saying nothing and I remember his silences more vividly than I remember the things he said.”
― Caroline Kepnes, quote from You
“The future?' came the voice sadly...'And do we really pass anything on to the future, except mirrors of ourselves? What if the future is as painful as the past?'
'That we can never know,'answered the wolf angrily. 'That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe the present. Here and now...What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything.”
― David Clement-Davies, quote from Fell
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.