Murder Quotes

It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.

~ Moshe Dayan

The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something many of his colleagues never figured out. Murder was deeply human, the murdered and the murderer. To describe the murderer as a monstrosity, a grotesque, was to give him an unfair advantage. No. Murderers were human, and at the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped, no doubt. Twisted and ugly. But an emotion. And one so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost.Gamache's job was to collect the evidence, but also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was do get to know the people. To watch and listen. To pay attention, and the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual way in a deceptively casual setting.Like the bistro.

~ Louise Penny

It's kind of like... It's kind of like playin' a basketball game. I am there and the other player is there, and it's just the two of us and I put the other player's body in my van. And I am the winner.

~ Chris Onstad

Twenty to life, she got, with time off for good behavior. You come around next spring. I'll introduce you.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

~ Albert Camus

It's like pretending to be Santa and then stabbing someone with a candy cane!

~ Ellery Adams

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!

~ Patricia Highsmith

In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That's the spirit of Christmas yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho.

~ Christopher Moore

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

~ Jennifer Birkett

I’m sure the ‘I wouldn’t fuck a murder conspirator’ argument wins over many an internal affairs review board. Bring him in. It’ll be in your favor.

~ Benjamin R. Smith

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

~ P.d. James

Something of a pattern had started to form and it was ugly.

~ Jeff Rice

What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.

~ P.d. James

He scraped through the dark sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, proptected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage. Then he fled, but his flight was slow as the flight in a dream, impeded by the deep sand and the blurring hands of the fog. He fled from the goodness of that home, and his hatred for Laurel throttled his brain. If she had come back to him, he would not be shut out, an outcast in a strange, cold world.

~ Dorothy B. Hughes

[First line]“The business of murder took time, patience, skill, and a tolerance for the monotonous.

~ J.d. Robb

I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em.

~ Carl Panzram

I like a good murder that can't be found out. That is, of course it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.

~ Emily Eden

I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.

~ Hope Barrett

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.

~ Jennifer Birkett

The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.

~ Theodore Dalrymple

I, Larry Vail, do hereby confessTo murdering Merry in her little dress.To strangling and raping and making a mess.To all of these charges the answer is yes.

~ Rosalyn Drexler

Murderers don't even know that murder happens.

~ David Rabe

Now get the fuck up off the ground so I can put you in it... like a coffin. Because you'll be fucking dead after I kill you, you fucking asshole.

~ Robert Kirkman

And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

~ Barack Obama

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. (Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation)

~ William S. Wilson

Rules meant order. Without them they’d be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.

~ Louise Penny

[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.

~ Max Barry

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivablybe right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.

~ G.k. Chesterton

He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.

~ Thomas Harris

Take a seat, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll kill you in a few minutes. It’ll be good for you.

~ Frederick Weisel

When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.

~ V.s. Carnes

Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The real core of this book is about the open secrets that can fester in a community until an outsider raises questions.

~ J. Alexander Greenwood

Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please.Anthony Perkin's Norman BatesTalking To Janet Leigh's Marion Crane.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

Salcombe Hardy groaned: How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

~ P.d. James

Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence.

~ P.d. James

There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again.

~ Caris O'malley

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

~ Adam Rapp