Top 100 Laura Lippman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.”

— Laura Lippman

52. “He has to know what she’s saying is too good to be true. Good Lord, if this were the kindest way to break u with a woman, that would be the greatest thing that ever happened to men. Maybe she should write an advice book for men, one that tells them everything they want to hear, as opposed to all those books for women, which tell them to be the opposite of what they are, no matter what that is.”

— Laura Lippman

53. “I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn’t have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.”

— Laura Lippman

54. “As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.”

— Laura Lippman

55. “Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”

— Laura Lippman

56. “It’s very different to have this kid that I’m truly responsible for.”

— Laura Lippman

57. “Her dilemma – the eternal human dilemma – is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future.”

— Laura Lippman

58. “Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.”

— Laura Lippman

59. “But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school.”

— Laura Lippman

60. “I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.”

— Laura Lippman

61. “People make fun of love at first sight, but it’s just good instincts.”

— Laura Lippman

62. “I begin each book with a challenge to myself.”

— Laura Lippman

63. “Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother – at least, every one who’s honest with herself – has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don’t want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.”

— Laura Lippman

64. “Cynthia didn’t mind Confederate flags. She’d like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.”

— Laura Lippman

65. “Cynics fooled themselves into thinking they had sussed out the worst-case scenarios and were invariably surprised by how life trumped them. Dreamers were often disappointed – but seldom in themselves.”

— Laura Lippman

66. “Esskay rested her head on Tess’s knee, gazing into her eyes in the soulful way that meant “Pet me,” unless there was food handy, in which case it translated to “Feed me.”

— Laura Lippman

67. “One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you’re getting two percent raises from a company that’s returning twenty percent to its stockholders. That’s a real grown-up’s job.”

— Laura Lippman

68. “Cain – and the password, “Indemnity.” Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar.”

— Laura Lippman

69. “Bring wine,” she hissed into the phone. “And Matthew’s pizza. Those lima beans with feta cheese from Mezze. Sopa-pillas from Golden West. Hurry!”

— Laura Lippman

70. “She had always thought of it as being rich, having so many books she has yet to read.”

— Laura Lippman

71. “Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.”

— Laura Lippman

72. “Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it.”

— Laura Lippman

73. “He was gone. Kiss.”

— Laura Lippman

74. “Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.”

— Laura Lippman

75. “She wonders if he is as exhausted by all the lying as she is.”

— Laura Lippman

76. “Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy –.”

— Laura Lippman

77. “Where are you getting your material – Portnoy’s Complaint?” “What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking.”

— Laura Lippman

78. “Funny Bones was good for quite a few laughs, although not quite in the straightforward way the.”

— Laura Lippman

79. “I hate to think how many minutes of my life I’ve spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten items or less line.”

— Laura Lippman

80. “She pressed her fingertips against the glass and thanked him for his insight. Supermax.”

— Laura Lippman

81. “Things have happened – so fast. Ten days ago, we didn’t even know Rudy was sleeping rough again.” “Isn’t that a British term?” “It is.” Mrs. Drysdale is allowed to speak to this at least. “But Rudy liked it. He said it was more like the way he lived. He wasn’t homeless. Our door was always open to him. Always.”

— Laura Lippman

82. “It’s impossible to imagine her in thrall to anything, anyone. She calls the shots even while pretending not to. Even in motherhood, she has shown this steely control.”

— Laura Lippman

83. “The world kept telling her to look away, to pay no attention to an age-old system, in which men thrived and inconvenient women disappeared.”

— Laura Lippman

84. “Kobe beef hamburger on the menu at Nasu Blanca – are.”

— Laura Lippman

85. “Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It’s not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it’s a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person.”

— Laura Lippman

86. “I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.”

— Laura Lippman

87. “But then again – if one doesn’t forgive someone, doesn’t one, in a sense, lose that person forever?”

— Laura Lippman

88. “How many times is a woman allowed to defend herself? In Polly’s experience, not even once.”

— Laura Lippman

89. “Her classmates were gossiping their way into adolescence, literally and figuratively.”

— Laura Lippman

90. “Towns That Love Sports Too Much, and the Greedy Team Owners Who Use Them. “So please.”

— Laura Lippman

91. “I’m for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.”

— Laura Lippman

92. “When it came down to it, Sandy didn’t have much use for words because so many of the ones he had heard over his life had been lies.”

— Laura Lippman

93. “Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.”

— Laura Lippman

94. “Oh, God, he was wearing his Tevas.”

— Laura Lippman

95. “You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought. It’s still a play where everyone dies in the end.”

— Laura Lippman

96. “Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney’s mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil’s advocate? Whitney could have been the devil’s mentor.”

— Laura Lippman

97. “In fact, I think every book I’ve written has been inspired by a real event.”

— Laura Lippman

98. “It’s a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.”

— Laura Lippman

99. “Family members must forgive one another.”

— Laura Lippman

100. “Tough, yet brittle. That’s the thing about being really hard. When you do break, you shatter.”

— Laura Lippman