Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Bosch had always thought it wasn’t a bad way to go – doing what you loved.”

— Michael Connelly

152. “Christian Scott.”

— Michael Connelly

153. “Did you know that this year the Pentagon told all members of the military not to do DNA kits because of the security issues they pose?”

— Michael Connelly

154. “The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.”

— Michael Connelly

155. “It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.”

— Michael Connelly

156. “On my way out of rent-a-car row I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way to Paradise Road. I thought that everybody needed a sign like that. I wished that it was that easy.”

— Michael Connelly

157. “He had lived alone most of his life. He was used to places that were empty. He knew the real shelter of a home was inside yourself.”

— Michael Connelly

158. “Darius McGinley had had only one profession since age eleven, drug dealer. He’d had only one true family, a gang.”

— Michael Connelly

159. “Don’t go growing a conscience on me,” I said. “I’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead you to anything good.”

— Michael Connelly

160. “We’re all seeking order. We’re all seeking control.”

— Michael Connelly

161. “The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked.”

— Michael Connelly

162. “It is an amazing thing to be able to hold everything that is important to you in one arm.”

— Michael Connelly

163. “I’m always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.”

— Michael Connelly

164. “There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it’s the cause that is usually most vilified.”

— Michael Connelly

165. “Time had eroded the bond between them. They were strangers who shared the same story.”

— Michael Connelly

166. “No matter what happens in the world, there will always be the need for heroes.”

— Michael Connelly

167. “Politicians could talk about building walls and changing laws to keep people out, but in the end they were just symbols. Neither would stop the tide any more than the rock jetties at the mouth of the port did. Nothing could stop the tide of hope and desire. Bosch.”

— Michael Connelly

168. “He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited.”

— Michael Connelly

169. “The characters I write about are very internal.”

— Michael Connelly

170. “There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown.”

— Michael Connelly

171. “Anybody who relished the idea of being a juror was blue ink all the way.”

— Michael Connelly

172. “The truth was, there was nothing in the law that I objected to more than the death penalty. It was not that I had ever had a client executed or even tried such a case. It was simply a belief in the idea that an enlightened society did not kill its own.”

— Michael Connelly

173. “As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it’s your job to capture it accurately.”

— Michael Connelly

174. “I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.”

— Michael Connelly

175. “The law could bend. If there were lawyers involved, then there was always a deal to be made.”

— Michael Connelly

176. “Freeman was a damn good prosecutor but in my view she didn’t play fair. A trial was supposed to be a spirited contesting of facts and evidence. Both sides with equal footing in the law and the rules of the game. But using the rules to hide or withhold facts and evidence was the routine with Freeman. She liked a tiled game. She didn’t carry the light. She didn’t even see the light.”

— Michael Connelly

177. “Ten years might as well be a hundred if you are doing time for a crime you didn’t commit, he said.”

— Michael Connelly

178. “I think there’d be huge losses if there weren’t newspapers. I know everything’s shifting to the Internet and some people would say, ‘News is news, what you’re talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that’s out there.’ But I think there is a change.”

— Michael Connelly

179. “You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.”

— Michael Connelly

180. “The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.”

— Michael Connelly

181. “If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?”

— Michael Connelly

182. “No, maybe you should start. I have my meeting at.”

— Michael Connelly

183. “It had been Bosch’s experience that when you looked back at a life, you used a magnifying glass. Everything was bigger, amplified.”

— Michael Connelly

184. “Little Peter’s,” Soto said.”

— Michael Connelly

185. “It was the era of fake news and reporters being labeled by those in power as enemies of the people. Newspapers were folding right and left and some said the industry was in a death spiral. Meanwhile, there was a rise in biased and unchecked reporting and media sites, the line increasingly blurring between impartial and agenda-based journalism.”

— Michael Connelly

186. “It was during my explanation to my young daughter that I finally realized why I had been drawn to this particular practice of law. Yes, some of my clients were just gaming the system. They were charlatans no better than the banks they were taking on. But some of mu clients were downtrodden and disadvantaged. They were true underdogs in society and I wanted to stand for them and keep them in their homes for as long as I possibly could.”

— Michael Connelly

187. “I told him through the door that he could take his job and shove it up his ass. ‘Course, a week later I had to ask him to pull it out of his ass and give it back to me.”

— Michael Connelly

188. “I’ve sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn’t capture the characters.”

— Michael Connelly

189. “The writing ethic was influenced – when you have to write every day, there’s no such thing as writer’s block.”

— Michael Connelly

190. “You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.”

— Michael Connelly

191. “Donovan stared at the car silently, contemplating it the way a matador looks at the bull he is going to fight.”

— Michael Connelly

192. “For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.”

— Michael Connelly

193. “And there’s this saying they have about conformist society: The nail that sticks out gets pounded down.”

— Michael Connelly

194. “Okay, Harry. We can work cases. But we bend the rules. We don’t break them.”

— Michael Connelly

195. “Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law.”

— Michael Connelly

196. “She was cremated.”

— Michael Connelly

197. “The intrusion of the government into our lives is pervasive. Where do we make a stand? I’m making mine right here.”

— Michael Connelly

198. “Los Angeles: there was no rush hour because every hour was rush hour.”

— Michael Connelly

199. “The case seemed to underline what many in homicide work knew; you can’t explain crazy.”

— Michael Connelly

200. “A preliminary hearing is a routine step on the way to a trial. It is one hundred percent the prosecution’s show. The state is charged with presenting its case to the court and the judge then rules on whether there is sufficient evidence to take it forward to a jury trial. This isn’t the reasonable doubt threshold. Not even close. The judge only has to decide if a preponderance of evidence supports the charges. If so, then the next stop is a full-blown trial.”

— Michael Connelly