Top 140 Lisa Gardner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sugar and fat a socially acceptable drugs.”

— Lisa Gardner

52. “All I’ve really ever done is write since I was 17, so I don’t know anything about anything. For me to do a novel, I have to talk to people who know things. And what keeps me in suspense is that I am a crime aficionado.”

— Lisa Gardner

53. “A perfect family, I think, is one that’s learned how to forgive.”

— Lisa Gardner

54. “Basically, that snapshot the smart fridge took to help you figure out what fruit to buy might also include a view of your ex-husband’s dead body, which you’d planned on burying later in the day with the shovel Alexa had ordered for you from Amazon.”

— Lisa Gardner

55. “Feel your feels, as the saying goes. Except so many feelings are hard to take.”

— Lisa Gardner

56. “Dual-income families have turned out a batch of superpredators who have no sympathy or remorse. Blast ’em up on Nintendo; blast ’em up on the streets.”

— Lisa Gardner

57. “And what is a marriage except adding A to B and hoping it equals an amount greater than the sum of its parts? Briefly, the promise of a new life almost made the math work. Except A was still A, and B was still B. We could create a new life, but we couldn’t stop being ourselves.”

— Lisa Gardner

58. “We’re about to be overrun by an entire generation of juvenile psychopaths.”

— Lisa Gardner

59. “Funny how you can fear change, even when already surrounded by the worst of the worst.”

— Lisa Gardner

60. “I loved ghost stories, creaky staircases, stormy nights. If it guaranteed nightmares I read it by flashlight, after midnight.”

— Lisa Gardner

61. “As an advocate of the Family Systems model, I would say that’s because you have acknowledged the piece of yourself that you were uncomfortable with, the Exile, resulting in your true Self being once more centered and in control.”

— Lisa Gardner

62. “Quincy, boyfriends apologize, shrinks analyze. Which are you?”

— Lisa Gardner

63. “You’re strong and that helped you, but this doesn’t have to define you. You are a young woman with your whole life ahead of you. Don’t confuse what you had to do to survive with who you are.”

— Lisa Gardner

64. “MY PAIN IS NAMED.”

— Lisa Gardner

65. “I still like the relationship part of any story. You don’t want your character to figure everything out and then at the end of the day, go home and eat soup from a can by herself.”

— Lisa Gardner

66. “Maybe she’d get a Siamese fighting fish. Or better yet, a ficus tree. God knows a plant would probably be a lot less offended that she ate take-out sushi almost every other night. It was a thought.”

— Lisa Gardner

67. “It’s so much easier to fall in love, and so much more complicated to fall out of it.”

— Lisa Gardner

68. “Because it’s one thing to survive. It is much, much harder to truly live.”

— Lisa Gardner

69. “It’s not easy, though, being brilliant. Nor being married to one.”

— Lisa Gardner

70. “It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won’t read women.”

— Lisa Gardner

71. “And if I’d once fallen hard for my husband, I fell even harder for my child. It was as if my entire life had been building to this one moment, my finest work, my greatest accomplishment, this tiny bundle of precious life.”

— Lisa Gardner

72. “I know you have a past, but personally, I’m vested in our future.”

— Lisa Gardner

73. “My mother would watch him and sigh. He’s a young soul, she would say, with a tender heart. She worried for him. But never for me. I was the happy one. At least, that’s how the story goes.”

— Lisa Gardner

74. “Not the cute kind of cuckoo, or the lights-on-but-nobody’s-home loony. She’s really, genuinely, sold my-soul-to-the-devil crazy. She don’t care about me or anyone else in the place. I mean, sure, she killed Frankie. And maybe she wanted to save the rest of us or whatever. But mostly, she just plain wanted to kill him. I mean, she stabbed him like a zillion times. Then licked his blood. I don’t remember Wonder woman ever doing that at the end of an episode.”

— Lisa Gardner

75. “Pain is not what you see and not what you feel. Pain is what you can only hear, alone in the dark.”

— Lisa Gardner

76. “No doubt about it: Mac would make an excellent mother.”

— Lisa Gardner

77. “I don’t know who I am,” I say. “No one does. Everyone spends their lives figuring that out, even people who’ve never been kidnapped.”

— Lisa Gardner

78. “The results are about as meaningful as a sixth toe – gives you something to look at, but doesn’t do a damn thing.”

— Lisa Gardner

79. “Families aren’t built in a day. But they can be destroyed in an instant.”

— Lisa Gardner

80. “Her hand now rested on the top of her left thigh. Where she had the knife strapped, he guessed, and immediately felt his gut tighten with a shot of good, old-fashioned male lust. He did not know why an armed woman should be so arousing, but man oh man, this one was.”

— Lisa Gardner

81. “For a bit, he picked up the paperbacks, thumbed the worn edges. Military thrillers. Books with clear right and wrong where the good guys always won in the end. Zero or hero. A part of Telly clearly wanted to be the hero. The brother who’d saved his sister. The troubled teen who, according to his PO, was trying to do better.”

— Lisa Gardner

82. “IN A DETECTIVE’S WORLD there was one true blight on society, and it wasn’t the master criminal; after all, superpredators were few and far between. It was the media. Sunday.”

— Lisa Gardner

83. “Being at the easternmost edge of the time zone, Massachusetts has one of the first sunrises in the country.”

— Lisa Gardner

84. “When you’re on book tours, you definitely need chocolate. At all times.”

— Lisa Gardner

85. “We are both women who understand there’s no point to the coulda, woulda, shouldas of life.”

— Lisa Gardner

86. “Society is not filled with evil souls. But it is filled with people who are mobile, fractured, overworked, overweight, overcrowded, and overtired. That’s a potent combination, particularly for people with poor coping skills and volatile tempers. And we’re seeing the proof of that in the increasing number of impulsive, angry acts, such as mass murders and road rage.” Rainie sighed. She rubbed her temples.”

— Lisa Gardner

87. “Mothers hold close, fathers let go. Maybe that’s the way of the world.”

— Lisa Gardner

88. “But welcome to the world of being a survivor. You make it out alive, and yet you spend the rest of your life wondering woulda, coulda, shoulda.”

— Lisa Gardner

89. “I don’t know much about international policing and I would love to learn more. Especially in this day and age when the Internet is rapidly reducing borders and crime can happen on a larger scale than ever before. These things intrigue me.”

— Lisa Gardner

90. “Assuming I keep out of sight long enough, my brother, the state’s most wanted killer, will find me.”

— Lisa Gardner

91. “I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.”

— Lisa Gardner

92. “Parents think the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is cancer. They’re wrong; the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is mental illness.”

— Lisa Gardner

93. “Everyone should say what they wanted. It saved time.”

— Lisa Gardner

94. “You swim and you keep swimming without a thought in your head because that’s what you have to do. And you do the push-ups and you jog and you do all the things beyond exhaustion because you have to. Then one day you’ll discover you’re in the zone and you don’t feel your legs anymore, you don’t feel your arms anymore. You exist just as motion. That’s the zone. Then you can do anything.”

— Lisa Gardner

95. “We all wear masks. And the more we have to hide, the more accomplished the veneer.”

— Lisa Gardner

96. “Sure, they all have iPods, smartphones, whatever. Generally speaking, it’s in our own best interest to keep some kind of electronic device in their hands. Otherwise they might talk to us.”

— Lisa Gardner

97. “Mr. Bosu began to get truly resentful. If killing was so damn easy, his employer should do it himself. Honest to God, a little murder and mayhem wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be.”

— Lisa Gardner

98. “Pain is very useful. It warns you of danger, teaches you of hazards and provides consequences for your actions.”

— Lisa Gardner

99. “A child’s bonds with his or her mother are extremely powerful, so any negativity in the mother is being communicated to the child.”

— Lisa Gardner

100. “Men should spend less time with guns and more time in childbirth.”

— Lisa Gardner