Thriller Quotes

He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There’s a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I’m not sure what animal it’s from. ‘Stoat,’ Harris says, as if I’ve spoken out loud. ‘They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.’ His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he’d see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal’s head and that was the only part he buried. ‘It’s been waiting for you all this time. Like I have.

~ Sanjida Kay

What makes you think I’d know this woman?’ Hunter knew what he was trying to do. ‘Listen, P-Diddy . . .’ ‘D-King . . .’ ‘Whatever.

~ Chris Carter

We’ve got DNA tests; we can convict someone by his saliva. Hell, if the killer had farted in that house the forensic team would probably have some gadget that could pick it up. How can the crime scenes be so clean?

~ Chris Carter

To start with, the overwhelming majority of serial killers are male,’ Hunter explained. ‘Female serial killers have a tendency to kill for monetary profit. While that can also be true their male counterparts, it’s very unlikely. Sexual reasons top the list for male serial killers. Case studies have also shown that female killers generally kill people close to them, such as husbands, family members, or people dependent on them. Males kill strangers more often. Female serial killers also tend to kill more quietly, with poison or other less violent methods, like suffocation. Male serial killers, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to include torture or mutilation as part of the process of killing. When women are implicated in sadistic homicides, they’ve usually acted in partnership with a man.

~ Chris Carter

A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn't smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strenght, not weakness (...)

~ Terry Hayes

He’s my new partner JJ and I don’t think he likes you very much. Last guy he took a dislike to still can’t eat anything more solid than yogurt.’ ‘Can’t you keep him on a leash?’ ‘Sure I can. The leash is in the car. I’ll go get it. You guys will be OK by yourselves for ten minutes or so, right?

~ Chris Carter

Every time I think I'm about to seize the moment, it drifts back into the shadows, just beyond my reach.

~ Paula Hawkins

Quote taken from Chapter 1: That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper. He let that part gel in me. Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham.

~ Ed Lynskey

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to bethese days, when I got this call. I could hear the rainbattering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

~ C.s. Woolley

Speculation is a dangerous thing without any evidence to back it up.

~ Jane Casey

The last I knew you were going to a party. just a few friends at the McEvoys' you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight about the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble?

~ Tami Hoag

He’d have denied it to his dying breath but Derwent wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be. For the very small number of people he cared about, Derwent would give his all. It made him vulnerable, and every now and then that vulnerability showed.

~ Jane Casey

For me, writing isn't about money and fame. It's about passion, an art form that I want to share with the world, expand the horizons to new worlds, new experiences, and new adventures.

~ Jason W. Blair

Whose Daddy's Little Girl Now?

~ Lauren Bradshaw

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

~ Oliver Harris

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?”“An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.”“What happened to him?”“The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

~ Simon Palmer

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

~ Tom Greer

I can’t wait for the day when we’ll never have to say ‘goodbye’ to each other again.

~ Stephen Douglass

The one ring, to rule them all’? Sounds very far-fetched to me!

~ Graham Downs

But death has taken root inside you and you know it will grow, like a cancer with a voice, from now until the day it consumes you whole.

~ Sharon Bolton

Far as I know, Legal Aid was invented to help poor people fight wrongs; [the criminals] are abusing the system, and the damned lawyers help them do it. They’re all sticking two fingers up at them who pay their taxes. And I’ll tell you sommat for free, Sir George, them who pays the taxes are eventually going to get fed up of it.

~ Andrew Barrett

It had been more or less the same for Jilly. Except that she had her parents there to field any phone calls, to accept the flowers at the door and pick up the cards that dropped like tears through the letterbox. She sat before her dressing table mirror in bra and pants and let time drip away, watching a face she didn’t recognise and feeling raw emotions eat away at the drugs she was on. The emotions were gradually winning.

~ Andrew Barrett

People who go to jail breed people who go to jail.

~ Andrew Barrett

She smiled as though someone had just offered her, the oldest virgin in town, a fully functioning Kingsize Vibro vibrator and a deluxe inhibition bypass.

~ Andrew Barrett

If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals!

~ Andrew Barrett

I am not their f*****g entertainment. And I am not a f*****g hero! Given the choice, a hero would do exactly the same again. I wouldn’t. Okay?

~ Andrew Barrett

Henry was now very annoyed, he had dug himself into a hole so deep that they didn’t make a rope long enough.

~ Andrew Barrett

Like a submarine ejecting ballast, he bobbed to the surface as another sense pulled his eyelids all the way open like roller blinds in the old cartoons.

~ Andrew Barrett

He couldn’t read her these days; it was as though she’d been taken away from him, and in her place some alien had dropped a figure that looked like Alice, but was a cheap imitation of her with half the emotions missing or malfunctioning.

~ Andrew Barrett

She had known it was bad, call it a mother’s instinct, but she’d known this was the knock that was going to scoop her insides out and leave her barely able to stand; merely a shell with nothing good inside anymore.

~ Andrew Barrett

I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.

~ Olga Núñez Miret

It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did to me, and that he’d been punished for it, and I might as well concentrate on the rest of my life, because over that…I had some control and I could decide what to do. I could change it over; I could become anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.

~ Olga Núñez Miret

We thought we were invincible and Dominic proved us all wrong,” - Jesse Carlisle

~ Nina D'angelo

There was noise in the corridor outside Alice’s office; and though it was nothing of concern, they separated. Roger stood, fingers tucked into his waistcoat pockets, admiring prints on the wall that held no interest for him. The noise was Melanie, but her voice, a length of razor wire wrapped in a soufflé, eventually faded.

~ Andrew Barrett

Use your intuition. Picture how things happen, why they happen. Don’t stick rigidly to first impressions, and once you’ve read the rule book, throw it away. Better still, burn the bastard.

~ Andrew Barrett

The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion.Rage.

~ Tara Moss

Heads up lads!” someone shouted. “Here we go!”More missiles, this time not just bottles, but coins as well. And then from the other side of the cordon, a roar went up. Bellowing across the road toward them. Billy watched as the Manchester lads poured forward, desperately trying to force a way through the massed ranks of the police only to be driven back by batons and gloved fists. Another salvo of bottles came flying across, trying to provoke a reaction. But the West Ham lads merely stood and laughed. They didn’t need to respond. The point had been made, the result earned. Billy was happy. Very happy.

~ Dougie Brimson

Okay then, we’re set” he thought. “Come and get it”. The enemy, his enemy, were walking into the classic football ambush and they didn’t have a fucking clue.

~ Dougie Brimson

Anna, like most English speakers, thought GASP was a silly name for the project. But the name got the point across. If there were modern wonders of the world, GASP - and Kali - stood as far above them as the Colossus of Rhodes had stood above man.

~ A. Ashley Straker

The dead man's face was pale and bloodless. The fierce white lights in the morgue showed up every detail mercilessly and every last pore and pock-mark was revealed, the history of a life, now reduced to a mere handful of scars. 'Always nice to see you Mark, but what brings you in so late on Friday afternoon?' Lambert said nothing, staring at Petrie's corpse, before turning to the coroner. John Humby was older and getting close to retirement and the two had been friends for a very long time. Humby resembled a large blood-hound, the more so the older he got and he was smiling over at Lambert, who was still thinking about the murder.

~ Stevie O'connor