Top 300 Harlan Coben Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man plans. God laughs.”

— Harlan Coben

Featured in: Quotes About Laughing

2. “You bring your own weather to the picnic.”

— Harlan Coben

3. “Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.”

— Harlan Coben

4. “Every person has hopes and dreams.”

— Harlan Coben

5. “Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.”

— Harlan Coben

6. “Dreams never die. Sometimes you think they are dead, but they are just hibernating lie some old bear. And, if the dream has been hibernating for a long time, that bear is going to wake up grumpy and hungry.”

— Harlan Coben

7. “Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”

— Harlan Coben

8. “This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments – and you get the tears at the end, too.”

— Harlan Coben

9. “Perception is often more important than reality.”

— Harlan Coben

10. “You can’t have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front – or a happy without a sad.”

— Harlan Coben

11. “There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.”

— Harlan Coben

12. “The faded engraving read: A Ma Vie de Coer Entier, which was a fifteenth-century French saying, “You Have My Whole Heart for My Whole Life.”

— Harlan Coben

13. “The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.”

— Harlan Coben

14. “Genius is a curse. That’s how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can’t. They see the world how it truly is – and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.”

— Harlan Coben

15. “Family and money is never a good mix. Someone is always going to feel resentful.”

— Harlan Coben

16. “If you want to experience love, then you have to be ready for pain. One doesn’t come without the other. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t have to worry about losing you. If you want laughter, expect tears.”

— Harlan Coben

17. “Those who had easy answers, be they on the right or the left, were always wrong. The world is complex. It is never one-size-fits-all.”

— Harlan Coben

18. “I love stories. When I’m writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we’re cavemen, we’re sitting around the fire, and I’m telling you stories. If I bore you, you’re probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.”

— Harlan Coben

19. “We pay attention to what works with our narrative. We tend to dismiss that which does not.”

— Harlan Coben

20. “Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something.”

— Harlan Coben

21. “Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.”

— Harlan Coben

22. “Its funny how you can let yourself forget for seconds, how even in the heat of the horrible, you can have moments when you fool yourself into thinking it might all be okay.”

— Harlan Coben

23. “Painful memories didn’t just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once.”

— Harlan Coben

24. “No characters in ‘Stay Close,’ including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.”

— Harlan Coben

Featured in: Reading Quotes

25. “Kids don’t do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?”

— Harlan Coben

26. “You want this so badly – this second chance, this chance at real redemption – that you can’t see the truth.”

— Harlan Coben

27. “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

28. “No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And – like it or not – I still think about her every single day.”

— Harlan Coben

29. “Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.”

— Harlan Coben

30. “Only bad writers think they’re good.”

— Harlan Coben

31. “William Goldman’s Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, “You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t put this book down.” I loved that feeling – and want to give it others.”

— Harlan Coben

32. “Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It’s much too strict, but it’s a hell of a teacher.”

— Harlan Coben

33. “Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.”

— Harlan Coben

34. “I’m thinking of taking up golf, but the idea of spending time with golfers frightens me.”

— Harlan Coben

35. “You don’t worry about happiness and fulfilment when you’re starving.”

— Harlan Coben

36. “So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly.”

— Harlan Coben

37. “Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.”

— Harlan Coben

38. “When you like something and you’re pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don’t ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.”

— Harlan Coben

39. “This was life though, wasn’t it? Death made you crave life. The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes.”

— Harlan Coben

40. “It all changed in an instant. That was something I had learned the hard way. Your world doesn’t come apart slowly. It doesn’t gradually crumble or break into pieces. It can be destroyed in a snap of the fingers. So.”

— Harlan Coben

41. “Death sucks. Death sucks, mostly because it forces those who stay behind to survive. Death isn’t merciful enough to take you too. Instead, death constantly jams down your throat the awful lesson that life does indeed go on, no matter what.”

— Harlan Coben

42. “Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you’re looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.”

— Harlan Coben

43. “I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.”

— Harlan Coben

44. “I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It’s very thin, it’s made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.”

— Harlan Coben

45. “Survival is the thing. The mind will twist to survive. Anything can become normal.”

— Harlan Coben

46. “Im 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.”

— Harlan Coben

47. “When I got home, I poured myself one last quick drink. I took a deep sip and let the warm liquor travel to destinations well known. Yes, I drink. But I’m not a drunk. That’s not denial. I know I flirt with being an alcoholic. I also know that flirting with alcoholism is about as safe as flirting with a mobster’s underage daughter. But so far, the flirting hasn’t led to coupling. I’m smart enough to know that might not last. Chloe.”

— Harlan Coben

48. “Don’t show me paradise and then burn it down.”

— Harlan Coben

49. “And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often – very last paragraph sometimes – I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.”

— Harlan Coben

50. “Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy.”

— Harlan Coben