Top 200 Michael Connelly Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

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

— Michael Connelly

152. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

156. “When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don’t like to reread them.”

— Michael Connelly

157. “Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch’s wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life’s work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action.”

— Michael Connelly

158. “How I work is that I write a story I’d like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.”

— Michael Connelly

159. “Bremmer stared uneasily and Bosch dismissed him with his hand. The reporter closed the door and went to his own car.”

— Michael Connelly

160. “Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don’t look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.”

— Michael Connelly

161. “Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.”

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

170. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

173. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

175. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

182. “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

183. “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

184. “Little Peter’s,” Soto said.”

— Michael Connelly

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

192. “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

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— Michael Connelly

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

— 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. “She was cremated.”

— Michael Connelly

199. “I knew the moment I decided to visit her the day before that I was buying myself another round of hope and hurt. But some people are fated this way, fated to play the same music over and over like a scratched record.”

— Michael Connelly

200. “Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.”

— Michael Connelly