Top 180 Jeff Lindsay Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But the rules are made by people who couldn’t win without ’em.”

— Jeff Lindsay

52. “I find others, those who prey on the innocent and do not play by the rules, and I make them go away in small, carefully wrapped pieces.”

— Jeff Lindsay

53. “Deke looked at me anxiously, reminding me very much of a large and handsome dog who needs a stick to fetch.”

— Jeff Lindsay

54. “What a frail thing a human being is – and without the Passenger, that is all I was, a poor imitation of a human being. Weak, soft, slow and stupid, unseeing, unhearing and unaware, helpless, hopeless, and harried.”

— Jeff Lindsay

55. “Money to me had always been merely something the sheep used to show each other how wonderful they were.”

— Jeff Lindsay

56. “First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense – after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn’t be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning.”

— Jeff Lindsay

57. “Me, feeling. What a concept.”

— Jeff Lindsay

58. “I took a sip. The taste was bitter and thin, just as I would be if I had to keep the Dark Passenger buckled into his seat belt for very long.”

— Jeff Lindsay

59. “It didn’t seem like Sergeant Doakes would give up before my conversion to a beer-bellied sofa ornament was complete, and I could see nothing else to do except play kick the can and hangman with Cody and Astor, performing outrageously theatrical good-bye kisses with Rita afterward for the benefit of my stalker.”

— Jeff Lindsay

60. “I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.”

— Jeff Lindsay

61. “But as I have noticed on more than one occaision, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.”

— Jeff Lindsay

62. “It made me feel almost giddy, like a high-school girl watching the captain of the football team worked up his nerve to ask for a date. You mean me? Little old me? Oh my stars, really? Pardon me while I flutter my eyelashes.”

— Jeff Lindsay

63. “Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn’t seem like a big deal.”

— Jeff Lindsay

64. “Hope is for people who can’t see the Truth.”

— Jeff Lindsay

65. “Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?”

— Jeff Lindsay

66. “I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy.”

— Jeff Lindsay

67. “Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical,...”

— Jeff Lindsay

68. “Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.”

— Jeff Lindsay

69. “Chapin was secured in the backseat – the motor-pool cars had rings bolted to the floor for just that reason – and he sat in his durance vile mumbling, ranting, threatening, and overusing the same naughty word.”

— Jeff Lindsay

70. “For my part, my interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago when I learned that it was in France.”

— Jeff Lindsay

71. “She really did like me, the idiot.”

— Jeff Lindsay

72. “Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.”

— Jeff Lindsay

73. “There’s lots of bad guys out there. I can’t catch them all. To be truthful, she couldn’t catch any of them unless they hurled themselves off a building and into the front seat of her car.”

— Jeff Lindsay

74. “Killing makes me feel good.”

— Jeff Lindsay

75. “Always marveling at how New Age pseudo-philosophy had taken over the Internet.”

— Jeff Lindsay

76. “It’s terrible to have to depend on someone else.”

— Jeff Lindsay

77. “So I wanted to make you a nice French meal,” she said. “Coq au vin.” She said it with her best Bad French accent, caca van, and a very small lightbulb came on in my head. “Caca van?” I said, and I looked at Astor. She nodded. “Poop van,” she said.”

— Jeff Lindsay

78. “Really now: If you can’t get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?”

— Jeff Lindsay

79. “I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book.”

— Jeff Lindsay

80. “Something it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only one pretending to be normal.”

— Jeff Lindsay

81. “He was blond, about six feet tall, muscular, and absurdly good-looking in a rugged, masculine way, as if God had taken Brad Pitt and decided to make him really handsome.”

— Jeff Lindsay

82. “Earth to Dexter,” Astor said, and I realized that I still stood in front of them frozen in my unlikely, foolish openmouthed pose like a pedantic zombie.”

— Jeff Lindsay

83. “Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth – it’s just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.”

— Jeff Lindsay

84. “Getting yelled at by a furious woman should be a semi-formal occasion.”

— Jeff Lindsay

85. “Rita bent her face down toward the floor and shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Then she sat across the table from me and took a sip. “Dexter,” she said, “it’s perfectly normal to have reservations.” “Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what she meant, “otherwise you don’t get a table.”

— Jeff Lindsay

86. “At nineteen, I certainly didn’t know the answer, although I already knew more about death than most of the other pimple-ridden pudding heads in my sophomore class at the University of Miami.”

— Jeff Lindsay

87. “Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.”

— Jeff Lindsay

88. “Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.”

— Jeff Lindsay

89. “I let it ring. I wanted to breathe for a few minutes, and I could think of nothing that couldn’t wait. Besides, I had paid almost $50 for an answering machine. Let it earn its keep.”

— Jeff Lindsay

90. “I smiled at her, my most comforting, challenging, I’m-not-really-a-shark smile.”

— Jeff Lindsay

91. “And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.”

— Jeff Lindsay

92. “Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits of his considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover on the computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.”

— Jeff Lindsay

93. “I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy, suddenly called upon to perform the whole act alone.”

— Jeff Lindsay

94. “I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself.”

— Jeff Lindsay

95. “In its own way the kiss had been an act of murder.”

— Jeff Lindsay

96. “There are still very few laws against thinking, although I am sure they’re working hard on that in Washington.”

— Jeff Lindsay

97. “I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young.”

— Jeff Lindsay

98. “I have really good eyesight,” I said, wondering if everyone who came in to see me today was going to be profoundly annoying.”

— Jeff Lindsay

99. “A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.”

— Jeff Lindsay

100. “Oh,” I said, and my eyes pop open to the fluorescent light of Deborah’s office, and no matter how hard I try to push it away and find a way not to believe it, the things I saw do not change. Even in the harsh and ugly light of the office the picture is the same, and even worse, I now see Deb and Jackie staring at me uncertainly, as if they had been watching me urinate on a busy street. “Oh, um,” I say. “It’s, you know. I just thought of something.”

— Jeff Lindsay