Top 140 Lisa Gardner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You know what the difference between a cardiac surgeon and God is? God doesn’t think he’s a cardiac surgeon.”

— Lisa Gardner

2. “You can be the hunter, or you can be the hunted.”

— Lisa Gardner

3. “Warn a kid with oppositional defiant disorder not to do something, and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the crime.”

— Lisa Gardner

4. “Without sadness, there can be no happiness, which means a state of eternal bliss really wouldn’t be that blissful. In fact, at a certain point, it would be mostly annoying. Nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.”

— Lisa Gardner

5. “God was in the details.”

— Lisa Gardner

6. “Bad people don’t want to deal with the powerful. They prey on the weak.”

— Lisa Gardner

7. “It’s not the flying that’s the hard part; it’s the landing.”

— Lisa Gardner

8. “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’?” “Anna Karenina.”

— Lisa Gardner

9. “Once, I was my mother’s daughter. Now I am my daughter’s mother.”

— Lisa Gardner

10. “Who do you love? It’s a question anyone should be able to answer. A question that defines a life, creates a future, guides most minutes of one’s days. Simple, elegant encompassing. Who do you love?”

— Lisa Gardner

11. “The truth did not always set you free. Sometimes it bound you to dark, bloody deeds and cost you the people you loved.”

— Lisa Gardner

12. “No. I joined the FBI so I could be heavily armed, and also help others.”

— Lisa Gardner

13. “Expect nothing and life will be velvet.”

— Lisa Gardner

14. “If you choose to do something, do it with your utmost. And remember, expect nothing and life will be velvet.”

— Lisa Gardner

15. “My secret vice is Sudoku puzzles. Can’t stop playing them. My parents are accountants. I blame them entirely.”

— Lisa Gardner

16. “You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair. You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”

— Lisa Gardner

17. “When men are cruel, it’s capricious. When women are cruel, it’s serious.”

— Lisa Gardner

18. “Every woman has a moment in her life when she realizes she genuinely loves a guy, and he’s just not worth it.”

— Lisa Gardner

19. “Youth is no excuse for sloppiness.”

— Lisa Gardner

20. “Family is family. Even if you hate them, it’s hard to let go.”

— Lisa Gardner

21. “Women cry. Men laugh. Whiners moan. Men laugh. Wimps complain. Men laugh.”

— Lisa Gardner

22. “Survivors make it because they learn to adapt. Adaptation is coping. Coping is strength.”

— Lisa Gardner

23. “It was not the past that broke you. – It was the empty future, the endless string of days filled with none of the people who mattered most.”

— Lisa Gardner

24. “We’re all in this together – when one writer succeeds, all writers succeed. I love discovering new authors. I think we need to take care of each other and talk about craft and nurture talent.”

— Lisa Gardner

25. “They died, leaving behind the kind of void that is never filled, a relentless ache that follows an abandoned child throughout her entire life. And.”

— Lisa Gardner

26. “Irresponsible is only irresponsible if you fail. Succeed, however; and irresponsible quickly becomes merely unorthodox.”

— Lisa Gardner

27. “Sometimes fear is like that: It leaves you with nothing but the desire for it to be done.”

— Lisa Gardner

28. “I’m unique for a suspense author in that I don’t have a specialty background. A lot of suspense writers used to be lawyers or crime beat reporters. I didn’t even know a cop when I started out. I finally figured out that I could visit prisons – I just had to be willing to make the phone calls.”

— Lisa Gardner

29. “Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it’s going on right now.”

— Lisa Gardner

30. “I think one of the appeals of suspense is to safely explore our innermost fears.”

— Lisa Gardner

31. “Sometimes I think rage is like a furnace, and I’ve been angry for so many years now, I’m perpetually heated from the inside out.”

— Lisa Gardner

32. “You can be in love and still feel incredibly lonely. You can have everything you ever wanted, only to realize that you wanted all the wrong things. You can have a husband as smart and sexy and compassionate as mine, and yet not really have him at all.”

— Lisa Gardner

33. “It wasn’t that strangers couldn’t hurt you. It was simply that the people you loved could do it so much better.”

— Lisa Gardner

34. “The only time you’re calm, you’re centered, you’re at peace, is when someone’s trying to kill you. And that’s just plain twisted.”

— Lisa Gardner

35. “There’s no rewind, or erasing, or unmaking. The things that happened, they are you, you are them. You can escape, but you can’t get away. Just the way it is.”

— Lisa Gardner

36. “Do you really think it’s all gone away? Mental illness has just moved underground, into the homeless shelters and the city parks. Out of sight, out of mind for the taxpayers. It’s a crying shame.”

— Lisa Gardner

37. “It’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But no one says that strength doesn’t come at a price.”

— Lisa Gardner

38. “I could stay in every night for the rest of my life and my mother still wouldn’t be happy. In fact, maybe she’d be better off if I finally did go out and meet a grand demise. Get the waiting game over with. Because, as my mother will tell you, there are worse things than having your daughter abducted. There’s getting her back and realizing you’ve lost her after all.”

— Lisa Gardner

39. “I have a huge author crush on Stephen King. Have never met him. Would probably embarrass myself. But it would be worth it.”

— Lisa Gardner

40. “I’d clawed my way back to the land of the living. Because of Vero. She needed me.”

— Lisa Gardner

41. “Do you ever feel alone in a crowded room? That when other people laugh, you don’t get the joke? That everyone knows something-the secret to life, the true meaning of happiness-that you will forever fail to understand?”

— Lisa Gardner

42. “I want to cry but I don’t. I don’t. There are pieces of yourself, so many pieces of yourself, that, once you give away, you cannot get back again.”

— Lisa Gardner

43. “Being a survivor didn’t just mean being strong. It meant being lonely.”

— Lisa Gardner

44. “You don’t become a teacher without having some level of optimism. And you don’t stay in the field if you don’t believe that everyone, from bitter teens to burnt-out administrators, can change. I.”

— Lisa Gardner

45. “Survival isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. And most of the people I help, they’re still getting there.”

— Lisa Gardner

46. “People think trauma is mental,” I say abruptly. “I’m mentally scarred, damaged, take your pick. And with enough therapy, time, my mind will heal and, ta-da, one day I’ll be all better again. But trauma isn’t just mental. It’s physiological. It’s an adrenal system that’s totally burnt out, so that I spend days at a time in fight mode.” I realize as I’m describing this that one of my knees is bouncing uncontrollably. “Followed by crashes where I can barely get out of bed.”

— Lisa Gardner

47. “The truth is, genius and depression have always gone hand in hand. Which was why I spent so many afternoons, sitting at the piano, playing and playing, because my father said my music soothed his spirit and allowed him to rest in a way a truly great mind could never completely be at ease.”

— Lisa Gardner

48. “And how many episodes of being “not yourself” do you get before people figure out this is who you really are? I.”

— Lisa Gardner

49. “Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.”

— Lisa Gardner

50. “Shallow graves took on a life of their own. And eventually, all bodies did what they were meant to do. Decay. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Disappearing back into the earth, until months later, a uniquely shaped depression was formed. The kind of hollow that any experienced homicide detective could look at and say, hey, betcha a body is buried there. The.”

— Lisa Gardner