Top 40 Terry Hayes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

— Terry Hayes

2. “Locard’s Exchange Principle and it says “every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”

— Terry Hayes

3. “Computers don’t lie, but liars can compute.”

— Terry Hayes

4. “The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.”

— Terry Hayes

5. “A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that ’sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”

— Terry Hayes

6. “Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.”

— Terry Hayes

7. “You can kill a thinker, but you can’t kill the thought.”

— Terry Hayes

8. “When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”

— Terry Hayes

9. “Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for – justice, decency, humanity – and.”

— Terry Hayes

10. “As a Turkish proverb says – it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.”

— Terry Hayes

11. “Nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.”

— Terry Hayes

12. “A child without parents learns to survive: they work out early to mask what they feel and if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in their head, and hide inside.”

— Terry Hayes

13. “Sometimes the things that are missing are of far greater importance. In.”

— Terry Hayes

14. “As a Swiss writer once said, “We wanted a labor force but human beings came,” and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book, and huge swathes of their culture with them.”

— Terry Hayes

15. “Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for – justice, decency, humanity – and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them. Lost in thought, I headed for the.”

— Terry Hayes

16. “They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist. That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come around and hit him on the head.” He looked at me for a moment. “It’s a Zen story, of course,” he said, smiling again. “The point is – if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

— Terry Hayes

17. “Dark omens or not, life has a way of cornering us. A person either stands up or he doesn’t.”

— Terry Hayes

18. “Saint Mark, chapter 16, verse 6.”

— Terry Hayes

19. “Shocking as it was, over 45 percent of Arab women couldn’t read or write.”

— Terry Hayes

20. “That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. “He is risen,” it says. He is risen.”

— Terry Hayes

21. “With the family’s meager goods finally unloaded, the boy’s mother stood with the old man in the decaying kitchen, quietly trying to thank him.”

— Terry Hayes

22. “People say love is weak, but they’re wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things – patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love – the epic and the small, the noble and the base – the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.”

— Terry Hayes

23. “I have heard people say love is weak but they’re wrong – love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things – patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love – the epic and the small, the noble and the base – the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.”

— Terry Hayes

24. “I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed, it was a different planet: the world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.”

— Terry Hayes

25. “Within hours, large crowds were streaming into the car park and by the time a twelve-year-old boy – the Saracen’s best friend – drove past with his father he knew exactly what it meant. It was a Friday – the Muslim day of rest – and the traffic was terrible, so it took the kid over an hour to get home. He immediately grabbed his bicycle and rode eight miles to tell his friend what he had seen.”

— Terry Hayes

26. “I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.”

— Terry Hayes

27. “Without grace, everyone is running from something.”

— Terry Hayes

28. “As somebody once said, there was only one thing to recommend it – say you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.”

— Terry Hayes

29. “Somehow, she and the physicians rolled the stone back from the cave and eventually he was released to the high-dependency unit.”

— Terry Hayes

30. “After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.”

— Terry Hayes

31. “We’ve got one huge advantage – people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace – computers don’t lie but liars can compute.”

— Terry Hayes

32. “If you take the bomb out of it, August 6th was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.”

— Terry Hayes

33. “Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence.”

— Terry Hayes

34. “I was a perfect candidate for the secret world. I was smart, I had always been a loner and I was damaged deep in my soul.”

— Terry Hayes

35. “They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace – computers don’t lie but liars can compute.”

— Terry Hayes

36. “I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders.”

— Terry Hayes

37. “I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.”

— Terry Hayes

38. “He was in his midforties, tall and overweight, a sausage-fingered vulgarian in a slick suit.”

— Terry Hayes

39. “They say that when men are dying in battle their fingers nearly always twist into the soil, trying to hold on to the earth and all the pain and love it holds. The.”

— Terry Hayes

40. “The blind imam told him God sends only as much suffering as a man can handle.”

— Terry Hayes

41. “Like people say – if you want to make God laugh, tell him you’ve got plans.”

— Terry Hayes

42. “Is her husband a cop too? That’s the way it usually works in.”

— Terry Hayes

43. “When I had arrived at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream, and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade. By the.”

— Terry Hayes

44. “The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone.”

— Terry Hayes

45. “He decided that, despite the swelling and purple bruises, neither my ribs nor my kneecap were broken. Fractured, maybe, but there was no way of telling without an X-ray. ‘Feel like a drive to the hospital in Milas?’ he.”

— Terry Hayes

46. “There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you – just listen to them.”

— Terry Hayes

47. “I was so engrossed by the idea that it took me a moment to register that the drivers behind were laying on their horns and I had a green. I hit the gas, rummaged one-handed through the files Cumali had given me, found a note to the medical examiner with her mobile number attached to it, and pulled out my cell phone. I was halfway through dialing when I realized that a woman with a six-year-old child might not appreciate being woken, and, anyway, what was she going to do that late at night?”

— Terry Hayes

48. “Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance – Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe.”

— Terry Hayes