Top 90 Barry Lyga Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He realized he’d spent his life trying to understand Billy. But had never really understood himself.”

— Barry Lyga

52. “Jazz closed his eyes.”

— Barry Lyga

53. “It was like playing checkers, only to learn that your opponent was playing chess all along.”

— Barry Lyga

54. “It’s a good day when a goddess gets on the school-bus with you.”

— Barry Lyga

55. “Yes, pain meant life. But life did not mean pain.”

— Barry Lyga

56. “Popular culture woefully underprepares us for actual therapy.”

— Barry Lyga

57. “Billy always survived. Like a cockroach. The world’s smartest, meanest, craziest cockroach.”

— Barry Lyga

58. “According to the report, Jane Doe stood no more than five foot one – when standing was still possible. A killer’s dream victim. You couldn’t custom-order one better.”

— Barry Lyga

59. “Howie swore translated to “I am strong and mighty in the wind,” but which Jazz feared actually translated to “Another dumbass white kid with Asian tats. LOL.”

— Barry Lyga

60. “I don’t believe in writer’s block. Writer’s block is when you’re running down an ally and all of a sudden you’re trapped by a brick wall. You can’t go under, over, or through it. You’re stuck. But the problem isn’t that you can’t pass the brick wall. You see, the problem is that you went down the wrong ally.”

— Barry Lyga

61. “You know how that goes, G. William,” Jazz said lightly. “If you outlaw police scanners, only outlaws will have police scanners.”

— Barry Lyga

62. “But Billy had done good deeds all the time. So had John Wayne Gacy, and dozens of others. It didn’t matter. It was all part of the disguise. Jazz realized that he couldn’t trust even his noblest impulses. They might not be genuine. They might just be camouflage.”

— Barry Lyga

63. “But you know, sometimes the fight itself is worthwile, even if the prize at the end ain’t.”

— Barry Lyga

64. “Homecoming’s stupid.” And it is. Buch of kids looking for excuses to grope eachother all night.”

— Barry Lyga

65. “This isn’t ‘I do something for you, you do something for me’. This is hard-core friendship. Varsity level. This is me asking you to do something for me without getting anything in return. This is friendship, Howie.”

— Barry Lyga

66. “There’s a difference between what you’ll do in your mind and what you’ll actually do for real.”

— Barry Lyga

67. “Disappointment is part of parenthood, Jasper. The trick is learnin’ to love your kids even when they disappoint you.”

— Barry Lyga

68. “Nice is the white bread of the English language adjective breadbox. It’s tasteless, bland, and forgettable.”

— Barry Lyga

69. “Luck, though, as Billy had said it so many times, was like lightning – it struck sinners and saints in equal measure, and it did to on its time-table, not yours.”

— Barry Lyga

70. “Fate comes in and sweeps us all like a big broom, you hear? And the dust goes flyin’ and it lands where it lands, and we get no say in the matter.”

— Barry Lyga

71. “I’m not sure which is worse – being born to it or learning it.”

— Barry Lyga

72. “At least he took the rest of the food I brought him. A growing boy fighting his insane father to the death has to keep the calorie count up there. Fighting to the death is sweaty work.”

— Barry Lyga

73. “At the end of the day, it’s a series of individual challenges played out against a team defense. It’s a psersonal test every time I step into the batter’s box: Can I do better than the last time? And that’s why I love it.”

— Barry Lyga

74. “Parents get all focused on themselves, and they see their little babies start walkin’ and talkin’, and since they kinda look like them and sound like the, they start thinking of those little babies as themselves... And then something funny happens. Those babies grow up to be kids and teenages and grown-ups in their own right... so everything the kids do, everything, is a betrayal.”

— Barry Lyga

75. “She strokes my cheek. “Don’t hate yourself, sweetheart. It gets you nothing. It gets you nowhere.”

— Barry Lyga

76. “I just have an allergic reaction to lung cancer. Gives me tumors.”

— Barry Lyga

77. “Once he gets inside your head, you’re dead.”

— Barry Lyga

78. “All I have to do is wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, Jazz. Everything else is optional.”

— Barry Lyga

79. “Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.”

— Barry Lyga

80. “No matter what his birth certificate said or didn’t say, he was Billy Dent’s son.”

— Barry Lyga

81. “You and your scars. Please! You don’t kill youself like this!” I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. “That’s just a cry for help. That’s just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That’s just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn’t really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time.”

— Barry Lyga

82. “We all do stupid things, Conscience. If they don’t kill us, they weren’t stupid enough, I guess.”

— Barry Lyga

83. “I can’t stop you from killing yourself. If that’s what you truly want, no one can stop you. I can’t be around twenty-four hours a day, looking after you. But if that’s what you want, don’t you think you owe it to your mother to talk to her first?”

— Barry Lyga

84. “Like a serial killer, the house blended in. It suited its place and its place suited it.”

— Barry Lyga

85. “For a fat guy, G. William sure could sustain a long burst of screaming and yelling.”

— Barry Lyga

86. “He wasn’t just dead; he was severely dead. He was one of the deadest people Hughes had ever seen, and Hughes had seen quite a few.”

— Barry Lyga

87. “You can never completely escape your DNA.”

— Barry Lyga

88. “What’s it like to go looking for your soul, only to learn you never had one to begin with?”

— Barry Lyga

89. “He had to do it in secret. He didn’t want people to think he was buying forgiveness or understanding. Those two things should not be for sale, at any price.”

— Barry Lyga

90. “I’m going to die. This is how I’m going to die, and this is where I’m going to die. Because I did all the stupid things you yell at stupid people for doing in stupid movies.”

— Barry Lyga

91. “He wondered if all kids-if normal kids-had this moment of epiphany, this sudden sensation of understanding that their parents weren’t gods, weren’t even kings. They were just people.”

— Barry Lyga

92. “Teens had the world’s best built-in poker face: a hormone-fueled, constant glare of bored contempt.”

— Barry Lyga

93. “But it’s high school. It’s not real love, or at least you can’t be sure it’s real love. Real love is messy and complicated and brutal. It’s been tested. Zik and Michelle have never been tested by anything mroe than being separated by a couple of classes.”

— Barry Lyga

94. “Today she told me about the Crow King.”

— Barry Lyga

95. “Even the lies were true.”

— Barry Lyga

96. “Ginny Davis – poor, dead Ginny – had lent Connie a set of yoga DVDs that looked like they’d come from the ancient 1990s.”

— Barry Lyga

97. “Violence suits you.”

— Barry Lyga

98. “To fool people, you have to work with their prejudices instead of against them.”

— Barry Lyga