Murder Quotes

Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket

~ Andrew Lennon

I'd imagine murderess trumps wife when defining a close relationship.

~ Robert Galbraith

They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.

~ William H. Gass

You will take his life but you can't take his memory out of us.

~ Auliq Ice

I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.

~ Eddie Campbell

It's a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”“Well, of course, I do too,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.”Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. “No,” he said. “Not that bad.

~ Donna Tartt

If you wanted to kill me, why haven't you smothered me in my sleep? No sport in that. She gestured towards the ceiling. Can I expect to be strung up on that bar and gutted like a deer? He looked up at the bar and frowned. Too much sport. Lots of heave-hoeing. Big mess to clean up after. Instead, why don't you just drink the poison-laced whiskey? He extended the glass toward her again and when she didn't move he said, No? Okay then. He shot the drink. She might not want the edge taken off but he sure as hell did.

~ Sandra Brown

Every human life has infinite value and to destroy even one is a crime against all humanity.

~ Marty Rubin

No, the events which I am about to describe were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. They still are. It is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire fabric of society and, particularly at a time of war, this is something I cannot risk.

~ Anthony Horowitz

I should have known when I first saw that picture. For it is a very remarkable picture. It is the picture of a murderess painted by her victim-it is the picture of a girl watching her lover dies.

~ Agatha Christie

Ashes, ashes.” Her whispered words of an old rhyme smashed through the silence as thunder, and in unison, the shadow figures answered.“We all fall down.

~ A.f. Stewart

...a murder of crows gormandized until they were satiated.

~ Rex Curry

Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.

~ Clive Barker

The man cocked his gun and Patty had time for one last thought: I wish, I wish, I wish I could take this back.

~ Gillian Flynn

That’s quite the specific search...'Sadistic Old-Bag-Murdering Witches'—I can’t even begin to imagine what that involves.

~ Stacey T. Hunt

This education we're giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that's what makes it so painful. We're showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.

~ Malcolm Bradbury

My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money in one sock and a knife in the other, coming to the new world with an old world motive--to murder the man that had left her for America.

~ Andrew Cotto

What kind of dark, twisted mind preys on young women? I think it was Poe that said the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical thing in the universe, and if that was true… I was John Milton.

~ Bruce Crown

Maria, it sounds like he was insane. Rational people don't intentionally addict people. I feel sorry for those poor people who were unsuspecting victims.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

~ Lloyd Demause

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

~ Aravind Adiga

Taking a life, is not worth getting life in prison.

~ Anthony Liccione

No matter how many men you kill, you can't kill your successor.

~ Seneca

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasn't obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless you've got plenty of small change.(Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight)

~ Cornell Woolrich

The nights were advantageous, too. After they kissed their families goodnight, it was expected that they would share a bed, their bodies close, their movements obscured under the covers.

~ Alexis Coe

In the mind of the public, she seemed endowed with an almost supernatural power to commit heinous acts, now matter the time or place.

~ Alexis Coe

If Alice had a post-engagement policy, it was to pass.

~ Alexis Coe

In the distance, steel-blue mountains loomed heavy on the horizon, their shoulders burdened with the same accursed snow the gods were currently depositing upon the lowlands. Between us and the mountains, the vast expanse of one of the innumerable caravan sites littering the Welsh shores was dimly visible, and at the far edges of the sands, grey waves tipped a mulch of brown foam up on to the beach, a sudden deposition of wishy-washy creatures that seemed to spider-leg over each other in their haste to reach the shore and see what all the fuss was about.But even these creatures comprised of sea-foam were freaked out by the death-stare, for the little critters swiftly dissipated under the force of a skeletal glower.A skull lay in the sand, its empty sockets staring down the beach at the retreating surge. Their fear wouldn’t last long. Soon they’d realise the skeleton had not engaged in pursuit, their confidence would grow, and they’d encroach, further and further up the bank. Eventually, they’d be close enough to see it was completely inert, and would overrun our position, victoriously sweeping up their fallen foe and dragging it back out with them into the dreary waves.

~ Hazel Butler

He'd searched every corner of his mind looking for ways to avoid a rendezvous with Chico. In the last twenty years, Slade had come a long way from the ghetto orphanage where he'd grown up, but the only way he could help Maria was to get in touch with Chico. Slade remembered the last time he'd seen Chico as though it was yesterday.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, The True Story of Murder in a Small Town, begins on a steamy August night with two teenagers, brother and sister, on an evil mission deep in a rural Michigan forest. For one desperate moment headlights appear on the lonely access road. Will they be found out? Thus the story of one of state’s strangest criminal cases unfolds. Girl breaks up with boyfriend. He turns violent. She disappears without a trace. Then state police investigators set out on what at first looks like a fool’s journey. The story is colored by a bizarre Ouija board death prophesy and the roles of two psychics, a former practicing witch and a handsome young artist who is suspected of Satanism. The canny and elusive suspect taunts police and seems always to be one step ahead of them. When a key witness is daunted by uncharacteristic injuries, a mysterious medium tells him he is the victim of black magic practiced by the suspect’s grandmother. And when, after eight years, the suspect finally is brought to trial, he is represented by a Roman Catholic priest.

~ Richard W Carson

I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …

~ Hazel Butler

There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw

~ D.e. Ireland

Kusanagi had met plenty of good, admirable people who’d been turned into murderers by circumstance. There was something about them he always seemed to sense, an aura that they shared. Somehow, their transgression freed them from the confines of a mortal existence, allowing them to perceive the great truths of the universe. At the same time, it meant they had one foot in forbidden territory. They straddled the line between sanity and madness.

~ Keigo Higashino

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?

~ Dean Koontz

For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not diehe does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgracenor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his facenor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty spaceHe does not sit with silent men who watch him night and dayWho watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to prayWho watch him lest himself should rob the prison of its prey

~ Oscar Wilde

Drug addicts had their drugs. Alcoholics had their bottles. Serial killers had their murders.

~ Jess C. Scott

Don't make me cover your face with a pillow until you see my side of things.Isn't that called murder?

~ G.a. Aiken

You know, when the list of people who have a really good reason to want you dead covers more than two sheets of paper, you might want to start rethinking your life choices.

~ Rebecca Wolf-Nail

Don’t go,” said Cedric. “Murder has made you practically one of the family.

~ Agatha Christie

When you kill someone, something from that person passes to you - a sigh, a smell or a gesture. I call it the curse of the victim. It clings to your body and seeps into your skin, going all the way into your heart, and thus continues to live within you. I carry with me the traces of all the men I have killed. I wear them around my neck like invisible necklaces, feeling their presence against my flesh, tight and heavy. In every murderer breathes the man he murdered.

~ Elif Shafak