Her smile shames the sun

— Harlan Coben

He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Night, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.

— Harlan Coben

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self-inflicted.

— Harlan Coben

I blinked, and the images were gone. But I remembered how the laugh and the howl and the splash would ripple and echo in the stillness of our lake, and I wondered if ripples and echoes like those ever fully die away, if somewhere in the woods my father's joyful yelps still bounced quietly off the trees. Silly thought, but there you go.

— Harlan Coben

I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

— Harlan Coben

I kept glancing at her animated face, scrunched up as though imitating an adult. I got hit with that overwhelming feeling. It sneaked up on me. Parents get it from time to time. You are looking at your child, and it is an ordinary moment, not like they are onstage or hitting a winning shop, just sitting there, and you look at them, and you know that they are your whole life and that moves you and scares you and makes you want to stop time.

— Harlan Coben

I'm not a big sports fan.

— Harlan Coben

In sum," Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, "Our defense will be...?" He looked to Matt for the answer/"Blame the other guy," Matt said." Which other guy?"" Yes."" Huh?"" We blame whoever we can," Matt said. "The CFO, the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter-Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled."" Isn't that contradictory?" Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. "Claiming both malice and mistakes?" He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded." We're looking to confuse," Matt said. "You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury end up knowing something went wrong, but you don't know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and dotted i. Furthermore, we act like discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it's not. Furthermore, we are skeptical of EVERYONE.

— Harlan Coben

In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

— Harlan Coben

It's not the dead even. They're gone. Nothing you can do about that. It's what's left behind - the echo. These woods you're walking through. There are some old timers who think a sound echoes here forever. Makes sense when you think about it. That Bellingham kid. I'm sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing. Like a part of his is still calling out, even now.

— Harlan Coben