Top 180 Jeff Lindsay Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Sooner or later, having two separate agendas is going to cause trouble.”

— Jeff Lindsay

152. “No, you don’t understand. She told me to get you back. She’s made up her mind and I don’t dare disobey. She hits very hard.”

— Jeff Lindsay

153. “But it is a truism of life that no matter how much we are suffering, nobody else cares – generally speaking, nobody even notices.”

— Jeff Lindsay

154. “My life as an android was neat, balanced, and had real redeeming social value.”

— Jeff Lindsay

155. “Vince had answered the door in a body-hugging satin gown with a basket of fruit on his head. “J. Edgar Hoover?” I asked him.”

— Jeff Lindsay

156. “I did not spend a great deal of my time worrying about anything – planning, yes, making sure that things went just right on my Special Nights Out. But worrying truly seemed to be an emotional activity rather than a rational one, and until now it had never furrowed my forehead. But.”

— Jeff Lindsay

157. “The children are no longer your concern,” he said. “They belong to Moloch now. Moloch likes the taste of children.” “Where are they?” I said. He waved his hand dismissively. “They’re right here on Toro Key, but you’re too late to stop the ritual.”

— Jeff Lindsay

158. “What’s Hemingway?” Astor said. I watched the crowd of look-alikes milling around on the sidewalk, jostling each other and slurping beer. “A man who grew a beard and drank a lot,” I said.”

— Jeff Lindsay

159. “I don’t,” Cody insisted. Now he was not only standing up to both of us, he was practically breaking his own record for chattiness at the same time. And even though I didn’t have a heart, except for circulatory purposes, I felt an affection for him and wanted to come down on his side.”

— Jeff Lindsay

160. “What, in all very seriousness, the hell was going on?”

— Jeff Lindsay

161. “What to wear? I could think of no guidelines on what we were wearing this season to a party forced on you to celebrate an unwanted engagement that might turn into a violent confrontation with a vengeful maniac. Clearly brown shoes were out, but beyond that nothing really seemed de rigueur.”

— Jeff Lindsay

162. “Arabelle,” Debs was saying. “Arabelle, please listen to me.” Arabelle was not listening, and I didn’t think my sister’s vocal tone of combined anger and authority was well calculated to win over anyone – especially not someone who looked like she had been sent over from a casting office to play the part of a cleaning woman with no green card.”

— Jeff Lindsay

163. “Steady, Dexter, I thought. This is just a small, painful reminder of who you are and where you came from, brought on by stress. It has nothing to do with operatic cattle.”

— Jeff Lindsay

164. “Could this be the Apocalypse?”

— Jeff Lindsay

165. “By the time I got back to my office it was past time for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a 2:30 appointment with her minister. And by “minister” I don’t mean the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are ever compelled to visit one for some reason.”

— Jeff Lindsay

166. “But hold on: Didn’t I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.”

— Jeff Lindsay

167. “Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake. So I did not feel shock, outrage, anger, or even bitter resolve. They’re very difficult emotions to do convincingly, and there was no audience to do them for, so why bother? But I did feel a slow cold wind from the Dark Backseat sweep up my spine and blow dry leaves over the floor of my lizard brain.”

— Jeff Lindsay

168. “A bag of meat that breathes, and when that stops, nothing but rotting garbage.”

— Jeff Lindsay

169. “I floated through the rest of the morning in my cloud of adrenaline and alienation, the whole time feeling as if I might split apart at the seams at any minute. But.”

— Jeff Lindsay

170. “And why did I actually give a single hummingbird’s fart what it meant?”

— Jeff Lindsay

171. “Aramaic has no vowels. So MLK spells Moloch.” “Or milk,” Deborah said. “Really, Debs, if you think our killer would tattoo milk on his neck, you need a nap.”

— Jeff Lindsay

172. “Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it’s their loss.”

— Jeff Lindsay

173. “But to have a second person present, watching and taking pictures, turned a very private act into a kind of performance. It was absolutely indecent – the man was a pervert. If only I had been capable of moral outrage, I am quite sure I would have been full of it. As it was, though, I found myself more eager than ever to get viscerally acquainted with MacGregor.”

— Jeff Lindsay

174. “Have you ever been to this museum?” “No,” she said, drawing the word out into three contemptuous syllables as only a ten-year-old girl can.”

— Jeff Lindsay

175. “Because she had formed an image of me as a ravening monster?”

— Jeff Lindsay

176. “I felt as though someone had snuck in and packed my head with beach sand, even including the bottle caps and cigarette butts.”

— Jeff Lindsay

177. “He looked natural and unrushed, and had obviously had a lot of experience at either chicanery or skulduggery, depending on which word was better suited for describing officially sanctioned mischief.”

— Jeff Lindsay

178. “Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical, and I had thought that her new assignment would end her martyrdom as Our Lady of Perpetual Grumpiness.”

— Jeff Lindsay

179. “He was in his mid-thirties and thin without looking fit, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. “Yes?” he said, in a querulous tone of voice that would have been just right for an eighty-year-old scholar. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”

— Jeff Lindsay

180. “Doakes was gone. One small piece at a time he was leaving my life and releasing me from the involuntary servitude of Rita’s couch. I could live again.”

— Jeff Lindsay

181. “Baleen was a very pricey place that I would not have attempted on my own modest means. It has the kind of oak-paneled elegance that makes you feel the need for a cravat and spats.”

— Jeff Lindsay

182. “Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter’s night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter – and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce.”

— Jeff Lindsay

183. “In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one’s girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage.”

— Jeff Lindsay

184. “They don’t barrel into a room with guns blazing as most children of seven and ten do. As I have said, they were somewhat damaged by their dear old biological dad, and one consequence is that you never see them come and go: they enter the room by osmosis. One moment they are nowhere to be seen and the next they are standing quietly beside you, waiting to be noticed.”

— Jeff Lindsay

185. “Goddamn it!” she said to me through a mouthful of sandwich. It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her, but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent batido de mamey and waited for her to expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again. “Goddamn it!”

— Jeff Lindsay

186. “Ah, well,” I stammered, overcome by the absolute shocking effrontery and absurdity of it – were all human women crazy?”

— Jeff Lindsay

187. “My life was every bit as fine as hers, so I ordered the same thing. Because we were regulars here, and had been coming here most of our lives, the aging, unshaven waiter snatched away our menus with a face that might have been the role model for Deborah’s, and stomped off to the kitchen like Godzilla on his way to Tokyo.”

— Jeff Lindsay

188. “And of course you don’t actually have to take an IQ test to become a reporter.”

— Jeff Lindsay

189. “I knew I was supposed to understand that Rita was actually saying something very specific, that her pauses and stutters added up to a great and marvelous thing that a human male would intuitively grasp. But I had not a single clue as to what it might be, nor how to figure it out. Should I count the breaths? Time the pauses and convert the numbers to Bible verses to arrive at the secret code? What was she trying to tell me? And why, for that matter, was she trying to tell me anything at all?”

— Jeff Lindsay

190. “If you can screw up the case in the first few vital hours, it saves time and paperwork later.”

— Jeff Lindsay

191. “Other people are less important to me than lawn furniture.”

— Jeff Lindsay

192. “I yanked my steering wheel hard, cutting off a BMW with a very loud horn. I extended my middle finger, for once driving like the Miami native I was, and accelerated over the causeway.”

— Jeff Lindsay

193. “Why should I let anything stand in the way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of vivisection?”

— Jeff Lindsay