Nov. 14, 2024, 9:45 p.m.
Delving into the world of murder mysteries awakens an innate curiosity about the human condition. These tales, whether rooted in fiction or reality, poke and prod at the darkest corners of our psyche, encouraging us to contemplate morality, justice, and the fragile nature of life and death. The way authors and thinkers articulate these themes through quotes enriches the narrative and sparks reflective discussions. In this post, we've compiled a selection of 45 thought-provoking murder quotes that not only intrigue but also invite readers to ponder the intricacies of motive, consequence, and the enigma that is the human soul. Whether you are a true crime aficionado, a mystery lover, or simply someone drawn to deep reflection, these quotes offer a fascinating glimpse into a timeless and complex subject.
1. “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” - Leonardo da Vinci
2. “Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.” - Alfred Hitchcock
3. “The rain set early in tonight,The sullen wind was soon awake,It tore the elm-tops down for spite,And did its best to vex the lake:I listened with heart fit to break.When glided in Porphyria; straightShe shut the cold out and the storm,And kneeled and made the cheerless grateBlaze up and all the cottage warm;” - Robert Browning
4. “I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.” - J.K. Rowling
5. “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.” - Thomas Paine
6. “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” - Johnny Cash
7. “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.” - William Shakespeare
8. “Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.” - Sue Grafton
9. “And yet," said Poirot, "suppose an accident-""Ah, no, my friend-""From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together - by death.” - Agatha Christie
10. “I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.” - Wilkie Collins
11. “Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.” - Shaun Jeffrey
12. “Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.” - Thomas M. Cirignano
13. “Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?” - Jeff Lindsay
14. “The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.” - Dimitri Merejkowski
15. “And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.” - Christopher Hitchens
16. “As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.” - Nancy Horan
17. “There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,Doing more murder in this loathsome world,Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.” - William Shakespeare
18. “We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")” - Yevgeny Zamyatin
19. “Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!” - Stephen King
20. “A hanging, though, was something different. I got to thinking. We hadn’t never been to nothing just to have a good time. A hanging was special and we was all getting to go.” - Eddie Whitlock
21. “And at that moment, Thibaut knew he was a murderer. He had murdered his brother that night; he had taken away his brother's soul.” - C. JoyBell C.
22. “Murderers don't even know that murder happens.” - David Rabe
23. “On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.” - Jim Butcher
24. “He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.” - Derek Landy
25. “I remember one Gentleman objected to the Christian Faith, that it made Men insolent, quarrelsom and ill-natur'd. From whence I concluded, (as I told him) that he had never read over the Gospells; truly he could not say that he had read 'em carefully, but yet that in reading the History of what had passed in Christendom, he observed that most of the Quarrels in which this part of the World had been engaged, arose from contentions among the Christian Priesthood. Church-History is chiefly a relation of Church-mens Wrangles, and D. Cave in a late Book of his has denominated every Century from some eminent Quarrel which arose among the Clergy. But besides this, what was the Holy War, what all the holy Massacres and Croisados which filled Europe with Blood, but the Inventions of the Holy Church? And what is holy Inquisition, but a perpetual Series of Murthers carry'd on in barbarous Forms of Law against the common Sense of Mankind? Does History account for any Barbarities so great as those committed by the Popes? Any Cruelties so savage as those of the Holy Inquisition? Any Murthers so solemn, and religiously brutal as the Acts of Faith? Any Pragmaticalness so insufferable as that of the Jesuits? is not their Humanity extinguished by their Christian Religion? Such is their Malice that no Man can eat Bread where they have to do, unless he submit his Faith to their guidance, witness the present French Persecution.” - William Stephens
26. “No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.” - Nick Cohen
27. “You should have died when I killed you.” - John le Carré
28. “You may suppose that perhaps this Walter T. Wallace found his destiny in food and passed down to his progeny a legacy like that of the great Colonel Sanders. The folks here in Wallace County would love to be able to tell you this is so. But no, like their granddaddy, the Wallace men were thievin’ crooks, always with a scheme ready to separate the weak from their hard-earned money.” - Gwenn Wright
29. “Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.” - Stephen King
30. “In life one of Midnight’s favourite movies had been It’s a Wonderful Life, a touching story where a man called George Bailey is shown how poor the world would have been if he’d never existed, but now the young ghost of Midnight Merlot was sat imagining himself not as the kind hero of his own narrative, but, - but as the anti-George.” - Tom Conrad
31. “Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.” - Alan Moore
32. “Essay on Adam"There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between theseis only an issue of whether the demonswork from the inside out or from the outsidein: the onetheological question.” - Robert Bringhurst
33. “from the Basement tapes Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him."Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live.""If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!” - Dave Cullen
34. “It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.” - Ryu Murakami
35. “I needed to know, Jesse. I needed to get inside his head. To find this son of a bitch, I need to get inside his head.” - Stephanie Carovella” - Nina D'Angelo
36. “On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. ("The Moon of Montezuma")” - Cornell Woolrich
37. “It felt odd to have interrupted the life of someone she knew nothing about, to kill someone she had only just met, as though killing needed intimacy, deep knowledge of the other, to make it all right.” - Pamela Freeman
38. “Out there was a man who had murdered his daughter. And another who had stepped on her heart. His hatred should be aimed at the one who killed her, but all he could picture was Yoshino being literally kicked out of that car.” - Shuichi Yoshida
39. “I should not yield to it, he told himself once again as he walked along carrying the briefcase. Compulsion-obsession-phobia. But he could not free himself. It in my grip, I in its, he thought.” - Philip K. Dick
40. “If you don't like the path your life has taken, choose another.” - Robert G. DeMers
41. “Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.” - James Joyce
42. “The Proclaimers thunder through my head.Imagine it.Imagine killing someone to the tune of two Scottish nerds wearing glasses and flattop haircuts. How will I ever listen to that song again? What will I do if it comes on the radio? I'll think of the night I murdered another man and stole his life with my own hands.” - Markus Zusak
43. “The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.” - Tim Kreider
44. “She had golden blazing sun kissed hair, which hung down in loose, lazy spirals, a heart shaped pouted mouth, which was pink tinged with violet blushing, wide, spangled blue eyes that glimmered sparks to flicker and ember in the vivid intelligence of the moon’s love, and a yielding body, that seem to tangle in loose rhythm as I walked near to her.” - Keira D. Skye
45. “Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.” - Leslie Ford