Quotes from The Couple Next Door

Shari Lapena ·  308 pages

Rating: (138.2K votes)


“Her thoughts speed up and become less rational; her mind makes fantastic leaps. It's not that things don't make sense to her when she's like this — sometimes they make 'more' sense. They make sense the way dreams do. It's only when the dream is over that you see how odd it all was, how it actually didn't make sense at all.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“...nobody makes that much money without taking advantage of somebody. It's much easier to make money if you don't care who you hurt. If you have scruples, it's much harder to get rich.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“The wife is always the last to know, right?”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“She knows how judgemental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgement of someone else.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“Everyone is faking it, all of them pretending to be something they’re not. The whole world is built on lies and deceit.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door



“She knows she can’t survive this on her own.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“Anne remains in the living room, cradling her sleeping”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“He stares at her back and thinks about how much she has changed since the baby was born. It was entirely unexpected. They'd looked forward to the baby so much together--decorating the nursery, shopping for baby things, attending the birth-preparation classes, feeling the baby kick in her tummy. They had been some of the happiest months of his life. It had never occurred to him that it would be hard afterward. He hadn't seen it coming.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“I was crying when I fed her because I was sad about being fat and unattractive, and Cynthia—who is supposed to be a friend—had been flirting with my husband all evening.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“They will be judged, by the police and by everybody else. Serves them right, leaving their baby alone. She would think that, too, if it had happened to someone else. She knows how judgmental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door



“when a wife goes missing, the husband is usually the prime suspect, and probably vice versa.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“She makes things work the best she can, but it isn’t easy. Marco”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“listening to music. When we get home, we have to wake her. So no, I wouldn’t recommend her.” Rasbach nods, makes a note. Then he looks up and says, “Tell me about your husband.” “What about my husband?” “What kind of man is he?” “He’s”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“he wouldn’t be driving an Audi –”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“She glances at the baby monitor sitting at the end of the table, its small red light glowing like the tip of a cigarette.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door



“rapidly around the second floor of the house while”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“Who goes to a dinner party next door and leaves her baby alone in the house? What kind of mother does such a thing? She feels the familiar agony set in – she is not a good mother. So what if the sitter canceled? They should have brought Cora with them, put her in her portable playpen. But Cynthia had said no children.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“He must remain objective. He can’t afford to become emotionally invested in his cases. He would never survive.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“Whenever there was an opening for a new show, she would invite him; there would be champagne and hors d’oeuvres, women in smart dresses and men in well-cut suits. Anne would circulate around the room, stopping to talk with the people clustered in front of the paintings—wild, abstract splashes of color or more somber, tonal works. Marco didn’t understand any of it. The most beautiful, the most arresting thing in the room, for him, would always be Anne. He would stay out of her way, stand over by the bar eating cheese, or off to the side, and watch her do her thing. She had been trained for it, getting her degree in art history and modern art, but more than that, she had an instinct for it, a passion. Marco had not grown up with art, but it was part of her life, and he loved her for it.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“has learned in his years on the job, it is that people are capable of almost anything. Rasbach”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door



“Sometimes I wonder if it was right for us to keep things from him when you were younger.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“Marco hurries up the front steps of the house he’d left just hours before and bursts into the living room. He sees Anne on the sofa, cradling their tiny daughter in her arms. A uniformed police officer is standing behind the sofa, as if protecting her. Anne’s father and mother are not in the room. Marco wonders where they are, what has happened.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“clumsy fingers, feeling faintly guilty about going through his wife’s purse. It feels private. But this is an emergency. He dumps the contents onto the middle of their neatly made bed. Her wallet is there, her change purse, lipstick, pen, a tissue packet—it’s all there. Not an errand then. Maybe she stepped out to help a friend? An emergency of some kind? Still, she would have taken her purse with her if she was driving the car. And wouldn’t she have called him by now if she could? She could borrow someone else’s phone. It’s not like her to be thoughtless. Tom sits on the edge of the bed, quietly unraveling. His heart is beating too fast. Something is wrong. He thinks that maybe he should call the police. He”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


About the author

Shari Lapena
Born place: in Canada
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video. “Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,” Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. “North Koreans have no one like that.”
― Blaine Harden, quote from Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West


“The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President


“He made my mom call and tell Maureen I wouldn't be in to see her anymore. He said therapy is a waste of money. He also told her to upgrade the cable service and to order him a subscription to Military History magazine. The he went and bought a new fishing pole for Matt, who is dead.”
― Tracy Bilen, quote from What She Left Behind


“Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.”
― Deborah Levy, quote from Swimming Home


“If someone had told Allie that she would commit a premeditated act of murder, she would not have believed it. She would have spouted off all the reasons how she could never be capable of such a thing—that no matter how dire the circumstances, she would find a better way. She was so naive, so arrogant to think that the laws of necessity and unthinkable circumstance could not apply to her. She could tell herself that this was an act of mercy, but that would be a lie. This was an act of war. An act of terrorism. It was nothing less than an assassination.
If I do this, Allie told herself, I am no better than Mary. I will have sunk to the worst possible place a person can go. After this moment, I will be a cold-blooded killer and it can never be taken back.
So the question was, did Allie Johnson have the strength to sacrifice all that was left of her innocence if it meant she might save the world?”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Everfound


Interesting books

When I'm Gone
(56K)
When I'm Gone
by Emily Bleeker
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
(7.7K)
Devil in the Grove:...
by Gilbert King
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(286.2K)
The Strange Case of...
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Gracekeepers
(4.8K)
The Gracekeepers
by Kirsty Logan
The Brightest Night
(6.8K)
The Brightest Night
by Tui T. Sutherland
Life in Outer Space
(5.2K)
Life in Outer Space
by Melissa Keil

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.