Top 120 Tess Gerritsen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “That’s what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets.”

— Tess Gerritsen

2. “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.”

— Tess Gerritsen

3. “Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.”

— Tess Gerritsen

4. “I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.”

— Tess Gerritsen

5. “Only the forgotten are truly dead.”

— Tess Gerritsen

6. “Evil doesn’t die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we’ve been touched by it once, it doesn’t mean we’re immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.”

— Tess Gerritsen

7. “Everything’s a gamble, love most of all.”

— Tess Gerritsen

8. “The most dangerous enemy in the world is the one you do not recognize.”

— Tess Gerritsen

9. “We are not as impervious as we think we are. – Dr Maura Isles.”

— Tess Gerritsen

10. “Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.”

— Tess Gerritsen

11. “Sometimes, the stars line up, the gods smile, and love gets a fighting chance. Just a chance. That’s all it can really hope for. No guarantees, no certainties.”

— Tess Gerritsen

12. “Life is a series of complications. We have to deal with each one as it comes.”

— Tess Gerritsen

13. “We never know until the beast of opportunity is staring us in the face.”

— Tess Gerritsen

14. “We dream our dreams, and sometimes they take us to places we never anticipate. But they are our dreams, and we go where they lead.”

— Tess Gerritsen

15. “The best heroes in the world are the reluctant ones. Courage isn’t fearlessness – it’s acting in the face of fear.”

— Tess Gerritsen

16. “The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn’t look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.”

— Tess Gerritsen

17. “The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.”

— Tess Gerritsen

18. “God, it’s like reality’s completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can’t decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren’t there for me anymore.”

— Tess Gerritsen

19. “Sometimes, the person who could make you happiest is the one who waits patiently in the wings.”

— Tess Gerritsen

20. “If you want to remain at liberty, I suggest you not antagonize your defenders.”

— Tess Gerritsen

21. “From the moment we’re born, death is our final destination. Only the date and time of our arrival is unknown.”

— Tess Gerritsen

22. “There is honor between bitches.”

— Tess Gerritsen

23. “We are all descended from monsters.”

— Tess Gerritsen

24. “We are so good at killing each other, she thought. Yet we fail so miserably at love.”

— Tess Gerritsen

25. “So much of what passes for excitement in our lives cannot be anticipated, and we must learn to savor the spectacles as they come, and appreciate the rare thrills that punctuate the otherwise monotonous passage of time.”

— Tess Gerritsen

26. “This unsub is a classic picquerist. Someone who uses a knife to achieve secondary or indirect sexual release. Picquerism is the act of stabbing or cutting, any repeated penetration of the skin with a sharp object. The knife is a phallic symbol – a substitution for the male sexual organ. Instead of performing normal sexual intercourse, our unsub achieves his release by subjecting his victim to pain and terror. It’s the power that thrills him. Ultimate power, over life and death.”

— Tess Gerritsen

27. “The enemy was the microbial world, and over the centuries, it has killed more people than all of man’s wars combined.”

— Tess Gerritsen

28. “Death does not discriminate; whether saints or sinners, in the end, all are equal.”

— Tess Gerritsen

29. “What’s done cannot be undone. Lady Macbeth’s.”

— Tess Gerritsen

30. “You don’t have to die to go to hell.”

— Tess Gerritsen

31. “Beware the ignorant, Lorenzo. They’re the most dangerous enemy of all, because they are everywhere.”

— Tess Gerritsen

32. “In memory of Jim Heacock “In thy face I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty.” – William Shakespeare Henry VI, Part III.”

— Tess Gerritsen

33. “Frost lurched away, gagging. The nude man hung upside down, his ankles bound with orange nylon cord. Like a pig carcass hanging in a slaughterhouse, his abdomen had been sliced open, the cavity stripped of all organs. Both arms.”

— Tess Gerritsen

34. “When you’re a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It’s hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot.”

— Tess Gerritsen

35. “Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.”

— Tess Gerritsen

36. “When one hears hoofbeats, medical students are taught, one must think of horses, not zebras. But the doctor who sees my blood count will surely think of horses. He will arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. It will no occur to him that, this time, it is truly a zebra galloping by.”

— Tess Gerritsen

37. “Is this all we are? A necklace of chemicals? Where, in the double helix, does the soul lie?”

— Tess Gerritsen

38. “She now knew her death was inevitable, and with that acceptance came liberation. The courage of the condemned.”

— Tess Gerritsen

39. “The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.”

— Tess Gerritsen

40. “That’s what makes life an adventure. Sometimes you just have to jump in and trust in the universe.”

— Tess Gerritsen

41. “The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.”

— Tess Gerritsen

42. “So there was truth to what Julian had just said, about being strange. He was not normal, and he never would be. Cast out by his own family, thrust alone into the wilderness, he’d learned to rely on himself. He had killed a man. Although that killing was in self-defense, the spilling of another’s blood changes you forever, and she wondered how deeply that memory still haunted him.”

— Tess Gerritsen

43. “Even divorce, she thought, cannot erase all the bonds forged by years of marriage. Long after the papers are signed, decrees notarized, the ties still remain. And the most powerful tie of all is written in a child’s flesh and blood.”

— Tess Gerritsen

44. “Gin and cheese, she thought as she refilled her drink. All the necessary food groups for a melancholy woman.”

— Tess Gerritsen

45. “The human mind was expert at filling in missing details and confidently turning them into facts, even if those facts were merely imagined.”

— Tess Gerritsen

46. “She was the only woman in the homicide unit, and already there had been problems between her and another detective, charges of sexual harassment, countercharges of unrelenting bitchiness.”

— Tess Gerritsen

47. “That was the day she learned she was the daughter of a lioness.”

— Tess Gerritsen

48. “Can you ever really know a person?”

— Tess Gerritsen

49. “You can study a face all you want, but you never really know what lies beneath the mask.”

— Tess Gerritsen

50. “The one man you most want to sleep with may be the worst choice of all.”

— Tess Gerritsen