Top 100 Laura Lippman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s a serendipity to real life that the Internet can’t duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it’s that book that changes your life.”

— Laura Lippman

2. “Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”

— Laura Lippman

3. “There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.”

— Laura Lippman

4. “Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.”

— Laura Lippman

5. “Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread.”

— Laura Lippman

6. “We cannot imagine what we cannot see.”

— Laura Lippman

7. “I’ve gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.”

— Laura Lippman

8. “People who quoted other people were showoffs, plain and simple.”

— Laura Lippman

9. “Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they’re fortunate?”

— Laura Lippman

10. “It must be nice to be so strong and to think it’s because you’re so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there’s more bad luck than good in this world.”

— Laura Lippman

11. “Not everyone has to get the same things all the time in order for life to be fair.”

— Laura Lippman

12. “How we treat our dead is central to our humanity.”

— Laura Lippman

13. “I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance, as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not.”

— Laura Lippman

14. “Maybe if you never marry a woman, she never becomes a wife.”

— Laura Lippman

15. “Nancy began again, and she knew she was going to off-load to Infante the anger she had caught from the kid. Life was just a long game of emotional tag, one bad mood passing from person to person.”

— Laura Lippman

16. “I’m at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.”

— Laura Lippman

17. “No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.”

— Laura Lippman

18. “McCafferty’s was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging.”

— Laura Lippman

19. “The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.”

— Laura Lippman

20. “And he had no quarrel with dessert – a choice of chocolate, pistachio, or strawberry ice cream from Moxley’s, served with homemade brownies. His plate cleared, he.”

— Laura Lippman

21. “She studied the notices pinned to the bulletin board, the pamphlets. DARE – Drug Awareness Education. No, wait, that didn’t add up: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. An infelicitous name, all to create an acronym that didn’t work, in Kay’s opinion. It was too close to Drug Abuse Resists Education.”

— Laura Lippman

22. “I’m a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.”

— Laura Lippman

23. “Of course, she had paid for her books –most of them. Like almost every other bibliophile on the planet, Tess had books, borrowed from friends, that she had never returned, even as some of her favorite titles lingered in friends’ homes, never to be seen again.”

— Laura Lippman

24. “My family is really, really Southern – I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.”

— Laura Lippman

25. “A woman dies young, it’s man trouble.”

— Laura Lippman

26. “Read The Ghost Writer and American Pastoral, then get back to me. What about your father?”

— Laura Lippman

27. “Tess’s Uncle Donald winced when he entered the Kibbitz Room at Attman’s Delicatessen. The pained expression.”

— Laura Lippman

28. “Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.”

— Laura Lippman

29. “Everyone thinks everything’s a waste of time when it’s not the thing that leads to an answer.”

— Laura Lippman

30. “Goldenberg Peanut Chew for lunch, or a bag of Utz crab chips.”

— Laura Lippman

31. “The first kiss was at once passionate and chaste, a kiss that contained everything that was to mark their future together – his aching need for her, the slightest sense of reserve on her part, as if she would always hold back a piece of herself. Their last kiss contained their entire history.”

— Laura Lippman

32. “Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.”

— Laura Lippman

33. “Arthur Drysdale had come into the emergency room with a stab wound to his right thigh. He blamed the attack on a mysterious intruder, a home invasion in which nothing was taken. He said he came home to find a strange man in the house and the man grabbed a pair of scissors and jammed them into his leg.”

— Laura Lippman

34. “Everyone cared what others thought, even those who were defiantly different. They cared more than anyone.”

— Laura Lippman

35. “The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit – it all will be held accountable for the things it didn’t know, didn’t understand.”

— Laura Lippman

36. “It turned out that the United States was a desperately lonely place, where everyone had been worrying that a single missed phone call might change one’s destiny.”

— Laura Lippman

37. “She had thought: No, I was dead. Now I’m.”

— Laura Lippman

38. “Isn’t that supposed to be the scariest sentence in the world?” Infante asked. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.”

— Laura Lippman

39. “Man, teachers and cops and their part-time jobs. We do the heavy lifting for society, and we still need OT gigs. Nothing ever changes, does it?” Willoughby.”

— Laura Lippman

40. “She has no use for women, which is why she has to make sure to befriend them.”

— Laura Lippman

41. “Not only the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but Wise potato chips and Utz, Little Debbie’s and Hostess. Duron and the Hechinger store brand of spray paint.”

— Laura Lippman

42. “Of course, as the book makes clear, it also owes much to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, not to mention an article I wrote in 1998, about.”

— Laura Lippman

43. “This was the second job she had lost in the last eight months, and for the same reasons. Not a people person. Not a self-starter. Showed no initiative. She wanted to argue that minimum-wage jobs such as this shouldn’t require initiative. She knew how to live inside an hour, how to weather the slow passing of time. She could endure boredom better than anyone she knew. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not.”

— Laura Lippman

44. “He turns on the radio and it’s that goddamn song that’s on the radio all the time this summer, the one about chasing waterfalls. No one chases a waterfall. You go for a swim and next thing you know, the current catches you and throws you right over.”

— Laura Lippman

45. “There’s always time to read. Don’t trust a writer who doesn’t read. It’s like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn’t eat.”

— Laura Lippman

46. “She was not a dog person. She was not a cat person, fish person, or horse person. On bad days, she was barely a people person. She ate meat, wore leather, and secretly coveted her mother’s old mink.”

— Laura Lippman

47. “She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy.”

— Laura Lippman

48. “The thing people are never indifferent to are differences.”

— Laura Lippman

49. “What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson?”

— Laura Lippman

50. “Just because you worked hard on something didn’t make it worth doing.”

— Laura Lippman