Top 40 Mary Higgins Clark Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A library is a path to the future – find yours there.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

2. “The key to success is the plan your work and work your plan.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

3. “Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you’re saying, ‘Once upon a time.’ That’s what writing is all about.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

4. “Funny, when you finally faced reality, it was amazing how clearly you could see things.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

5. “When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

6. “If it’s meant to be, it will happen naturally.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

7. “The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

8. “It’s funny how, even long after you’ve accepted the grief of losing someone you love and truly have gotten on with your life, every once in a while something comes up that plays “gotcha,” and for a moment or tow the car tissue separates and the wound is raw again.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

9. “If you want to be happy for life, love what you do.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

10. “Approach your lives as if they were novels, with their own heroes, villains, red herrings, and triumphs.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

11. “When a scientist’s son or daughter becomes a scientist they’ll say “Wonderful! Wonderful!” So, why, in the name of God, would a mother be jealous to see her daughter become a successful writer?”

— Mary Higgins Clark

12. “As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

13. “We weep for what we may never lose.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

14. “If you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery. If you want to be happy for life, love what you do.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

15. “The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged. Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

16. “Regret because you really can’t control your life. Most of the time you don’t act; you react.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

17. “Happines is like mercury. Hard to hold, and when we drop it, it shatters into a million pieces. Maybe the bravest of all are those who have the courage to reach for it again.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

18. “Sometimes it’s enough just to know that if you believe hard enough and long enough, your wishes can come true.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

19. “Never judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, was the lesson.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

20. “The ones who are innocent help because they trust us. And the ones who aren’t so innocent pretend to trust us because they’re afraid of looking guilty.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

21. “Get what you get honestly. Use what you get frugally. That’s the way to live comfortably And die honorably.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

22. “The truth is I hate cocktail parties when the only person I know is my supposed date, and he abandons me the minute we come in the door.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

23. “God works in mysterious ways, he thought with a sign.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

24. “Hello,” he said. “Tom?” A whoop of joy. “Alice, where are you? Are you all right?” “Never better, Tom. And you?”

— Mary Higgins Clark

25. “I am reading now “Where Are You Now.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

26. “If only we could bring all the kids home. If only we could rid the world of all the predators.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

27. “I don’t want to judge you or anything, but other mothers don’t talk about murder at the dinner table.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

28. “I never imagined I would lose him, she thought. Never.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

29. “When Daddy didn’t answer, I knew that something was wrong. Mariah thought back to that seemingly endless drive from Greenwich Village as she had rushed to New Jersey that night.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

30. “I’ll see if the director is available.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

31. “Looking at it from behind, he was shocked to behold a confusing array of threads that led nowhere. Such beauty on one side, total disharmony on the other, but both part of the same plan. It was then that the message became clear to him. In this life we see only the back side of the rug. We don’t know how or why our unspeakable hardships are part of a beautiful design. That is why having faith is so important.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

32. “He was the author of a best-selling book emphasizing homeopathic remedies, stress reduction, and physical therapy as a means to reduce physical pain, advocating prescription drugs and surgical intervention only as last resorts.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

33. “That was when he knew he had to get a job somehow on the Powell estate to allow him to be there without arousing suspicion. He drove past Powell’s property and observed the oversized truck with the PERFECT ESTATES sign on it. He looked up the company and applied for a job. As a kid he had worked for a landscaper and picked up everything he needed to know about the job. It didn’t take a genius to mow a lawn or clip hedges and bushes or to plant flowers in the places pointed out by the boss.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

34. “The defendant. For three weeks, everyone in this courtroom had referred to her as “the defendant.” Not Casey. Not her given name, Katherine Carter. Certainly not Mrs. Hunter Raleigh III, the name she would have taken by now if everything had been different. In this room, she’d been treated as a legal term, not as a real person, a person who had loved Hunter more deeply than she’d ever thought possible.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

35. “I was at his house.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

36. “Our children begin by loving us; as they grow up they judge us; sometimes they forgive us.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

37. “I’ve been very active in a lot of charities because I firmly believe that much is expected of those to whom much has been given.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

38. “Father Frank had shared with Aline, Mike, Fran and Steve something Rose Kennedy once said, “Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?”

— Mary Higgins Clark

39. “I’m always in before nine, Glady,” Lane said, amused, “and you know it. Or if you want, I could meet you at her apartment?” She knew that that would bring a definite no. Glady liked the image of herself being followed by an assistant who was carrying sketches, swatches, and books of antique furniture and carpets.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

40. “Did you listen to that tape? It makes me sound terrible.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

41. “From the vanity in her bathroom she took her seldom-used cosmetic case. The image of her mother in her shell-pink dressing gown, so naturally pretty, so endearingly maternal, telling her to put on eyeshadow brought at last the scalding tears she had forced back for Laurie’s sake.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

42. “Those wedding magazines pollute a woman’s brain: designer dresses, thousands of flowers, and so much tulle! It’s too much.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

43. “She had no idea that less than two miles away, a man was Googling her on his computer, learning more about her life and wondering when to make his next move.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

44. “She never wanted Robbie to feel entitled because he was a boy, and she never wanted Vanessa to feel limited because she was a girl.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

45. “It had always been like this, even when she was a child. And now, fifty-five years old, happily married for thirty-two years, with one child, beautiful and gifted nineteen-year-old Susan, Rosemary could not be anything but a constant worrier, a living Cassandra. Something is going to go wrong.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

46. “Island and back on the day of the kidnapping. Leo decided that if Summer had an explanation for the travel, she might actually be telling the truth. If she didn’t, they.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

47. “I don’t think there is any book that can’t teach you something, even if it is how not to tell a story.”

— Mary Higgins Clark