Top 60 Gregg Olsen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “At the end of the day, trust is everything.”

— Gregg Olsen

2. “From the inside, a violent home looks starkly different than it does to outsiders. Children who grow up with cold, narcissistic, or sadistic parents don’t know that a caretaker with the potential for extreme cruelty is not the norm. Even when they see a contrast in the families of friends, they’ve already been robbed of the ability to challenge parental authority. Instead of seeking help, they hunker down and adapt.”

— Gregg Olsen

3. “Trust and stupidity are close friends. Of course, no one really knows that until it’s too late.”

— Gregg Olsen

4. “Dying, she thought, is the only way out of what is happening to me.”

— Gregg Olsen

5. “I thought that being with someone who seemed to love me was better than being alone.”

— Gregg Olsen

6. “No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.”

— Gregg Olsen

7. “I loved my mother because I didn’t know I had a choice. I had to love her.”

— Gregg Olsen

8. “He’s a narcissist, and I wonder what it says about me that I’m willing to sleep with a man whose eyes constantly look past me in search of his own reflection.”

— Gregg Olsen

9. “Why you need a reason for everything? Reason is something people say to make sense of things that don’t make sense.”

— Gregg Olsen

10. “It isn’t a mask that she wears to cover the past but an invisible badge of courage.”

— Gregg Olsen

11. “She’d done exactly what she’d wanted to do. Making people unhappy was her way of having fun.”

— Gregg Olsen

12. “Japanese collector.”

— Gregg Olsen

13. “No one speaks the truth to anyone anymore. Lies either by omission or purposefully have become our national pastime. Backstabbing is an Olympic sport. Or at least it should be.”

— Gregg Olsen

14. “People born rich don’t try so hard. They know they don’t need to. They already have everything they want, and they never have to break a sweat to show it off. Showing it off is for those at risk of ending up back where they started.”

— Gregg Olsen

15. “The women laugh a little. I do too. Though I’m only mimicking their laughter. Nothing is funny to me.”

— Gregg Olsen

16. “But learned personality traits aren’t often based on present reality but on a past from which there is no escape.”

— Gregg Olsen

17. “The lie would grow into a disease. Cancer, probably.”

— Gregg Olsen

18. “I was free. Free also means nothing.”

— Gregg Olsen

19. “A criminal case is an assemblage of facts and details in an order that presents a story to a jury. Some pieces of the puzzle are magnified and others are diminished. In some cases, pieces are hidden. Or, as in the case of Alan Dawson, tampered with. Meg.”

— Gregg Olsen

20. “It’s hard to unbraid a life with a man that you believe in.”

— Gregg Olsen

21. “TV movie announced by USA Network also occupied Mary Kay’s time and though she didn’t.”

— Gregg Olsen

22. “I’m sitting on a barstool in her kitchen while she hovers over me. “Right,” I tell Stacy. “One night. That’s all.”

— Gregg Olsen

23. “Claire and Dorothea are ill because they can afford to be ill.”

— Gregg Olsen

24. “Only in the campfire-stoked stories of Boy Scouts, bedtime tales baby-sitters employ to frighten bratty charges, or in the sweet delight of grandpas who never grew up, would the stories live on.”

— Gregg Olsen

25. “Larvae can consume an entire human body in a week.”

— Gregg Olsen

26. “As the campfire burned to an ashy bowl of red-hot embers, the boys would ramble on, piling up horror upon horror, like cordwood stacked under a blood-red-barked madrona tree.”

— Gregg Olsen

27. “Thinking and dreaming of what happened is a far different experience than giving voice to events that haunt you. You cry when you tell someone something. You shake. You get sick. You seek comfort. When you don’t speak about it and just think it, you don’t fall apart.”

— Gregg Olsen

28. “Our marriage is quietly rocky. Silently in shambles. I love her without a scintilla of doubt.”

— Gregg Olsen

29. “I don’t know why the water and the sky scare me. I wonder if it is because here at the ocean there is no place to hide.”

— Gregg Olsen

30. “There’s a singular kind of desperation that links all of us who cannot conceive but think of nothing else. I wonder about us. What has made that message play over and over inside our heads? Is it biology? I want it to be that. I want the reason I sit on the toilet, hoping against hope, to be biological and not some kind of mental disorder.”

— Gregg Olsen

31. “Beetles never stop. They gnaw silently and relentlessly. Guilt is like that too.”

— Gregg Olsen

32. “A warm smile, and some serious electricity passed between us. I felt it. I didn’t know if she did or didn’t. Hasn’t everyone experienced that moment when there’s a charge in the air between you and another person?”

— Gregg Olsen

33. “You don’t get to be the decider of what is yours and what can’t be someone else’s experience.”

— Gregg Olsen

34. “But, Kristen, the blood,” he says, “I don’t know how the blood got there.” He glances at me, then back at his drink. He looks like he might cry. “Honey, you cut your finger at work,” I say, though unconvincingly.”

— Gregg Olsen

35. “As we stand there, the rain rolling off umbrellas, a man pushes through the soggy crowd. He’s tall with dark, wavy hair that brushes his ears. He’s wearing a long, black overcoat, and his shoes are expensive and likely ruined from the swelling puddle that has suddenly surrounded us like a moat. Samuel runs to him and Angela follows, coils her arm around him.”

— Gregg Olsen

36. “Mimi Garcia’s little brother.”

— Gregg Olsen

37. “Victims who want to get help recognize how difficult it would be to convince authorities of the sadist’s behavior. They know that if they try but fail, the punishment will be severe. So, they often decide to just wait it out and hope they can eventually flee.”

— Gregg Olsen

38. “Nothing so terrible can be forgotten. But all she wanted – all the others had wanted – was a chance to get on with their own lives. They deserved and hoped for a chance at being normal. But that was never to be, though in time the headlines would shrink, the interest would ebb. But it could not be completely disregarded. There was always the angle. Always and forever.”

— Gregg Olsen

39. “It’s funny to love someone so much that it hurts.”

— Gregg Olsen

40. “Casting was a source of amusement. Tatum O’Neal, Darryl Hannah, Gail O’Grady, even Calista Flockart were mentioned as possible.”

— Gregg Olsen

41. “It is always easier to sleep at night if the monsters outside your house only knock when you give them cause.”

— Gregg Olsen

42. “Victims of abuse can still love the monster. This ambivalent loyalty might just be the predator’s ultimate form of damage.”

— Gregg Olsen

43. “Jesus, some thought, would get a new lawyer.”

— Gregg Olsen

44. “The young man from Seabeck who’d been in and out of the county jail so often he thought he’d be able to leave some belongings behind for his next stretch of incarceration.”

— Gregg Olsen

45. “The ones that test the limits sometimes do the most amazing things in life. That’s what I’ve always thought.”

— Gregg Olsen

46. “But in late March in the Pacific Northwest, a cease-fire on precipitation only meant the clouds were taking a coffee break.”

— Gregg Olsen

47. “San Francisco “Eyewitness” news team had.”

— Gregg Olsen

48. “There’s another, simple, idea that has been shared on the Internet: after buckling a child into a car seat, a driver takes off his or her left shoe and puts it on the back seat. Once they reach their destination, they won’t go far without the shoe, and they’ll be reminded of the child.”

— Gregg Olsen

49. “I’m going to get back to that place where crumble is a topping and not a way of life. “You’ve.”

— Gregg Olsen

50. “No one, certainly no teenager, was normal or felt they were. Everyone wore a kind of mask that kept people from really seeing what – or who – was inside.”

— Gregg Olsen