Top 100 Patricia Cornwell Quotes
#2. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.
Patricia Cornwell
#3. My fans want me to talk to them. And even if they want to be critical, I want to hear what they've got to say.
Patricia Cornwell
#4. I don't believe for a minute that the Ripper killed only the prostitutes we hear about - five and only five.
Patricia Cornwell
#5. No one good or evil ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled. Therefore, it is possible that the pure of heart and the purely evil have been here before and will be here again.
Patricia Cornwell
#6. When there's lightning, don't stand alone or think you'll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can.
Patricia Cornwell
#7. The body was not yet fully rigorous and was still slightly warm as I began swabbing any area that a washcloth might have missed. I
Patricia Cornwell
#9. A dramatic public display, Kay. The dam began to crumble with Columbine. It's not new, just the classification is. People have become addicted to attention, to fame. Profoundly disturbed individuals will kill and die for it.
Patricia Cornwell
#10. What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?
Patricia Cornwell
#11. Then I will myself to feel nothing at all. It's not helpful to react the way a normal person would. I banish what will interfere with my clinical discipline and reason, I run it off and far away from me. After all these years I'm good at emptying myself out.
Patricia Cornwell
#12. When what we believe we've mastered is no longer predictable we're not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm.
Patricia Cornwell
#13. Botox not only helps with wrinkles, it actually makes you feel more relaxed as frowning causes tension.
Patricia Cornwell
#14. When an aircraft seems motionless, it's either heading directly toward you or directly away. Better know which it is or you're dead.
Patricia Cornwell
#15. I had fired 9-millimeters before and didn't like them. they weren't as accurate as my .38 special. they weren't as safe, and they could jam. i had never been one to substitute quantity for quality, and there was no substitution for being informed and practiced
Patricia Cornwell
#16. People often say they don't dream, when it's more accurate to say that they don't remember their dreams. It gets under our skin, Kay. All of it does. We just manage to cage in most of the emotions so they don't devour us.
Patricia Cornwell
#17. I've always believed human blood is red because it really needs to draw attention to itself.
Patricia Cornwell
#18. When I was in second grade, my mother moved from Miami to this evangelical conservative environment in western North Carolina, two miles down the road from Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth.
Patricia Cornwell
#19. Technology made everything better for a while and now it seems life is circling back around to the dark ages.
Patricia Cornwell
#20. There's a penalty for trying to do what's right. The dark forces don't like it, and stress will make you sick.
Patricia Cornwell
#23. I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.
Patricia Cornwell
#24. Gordian knot, a knot impossible to unravel, and Alexander the Great solved the problem by cutting through it with his sword, in other words by cheating.
Patricia Cornwell
#26. The greatest gift is our own eyes, sense of smell, and abilities to deduce.
Patricia Cornwell
#28. It's not true that we are never given more than we can bear. Only it isn't given.
Patricia Cornwell
#30. You have to live where you wake up, even if someone else dreamed you there.
Patricia Cornwell
#31. Her case in particular haunts me. Despite decades of autopsies and crime scenes, I can honestly say I've never encountered the extreme brutality shown in the only existing scene photographs from the Ripper case.
Patricia Cornwell
#34. But those days of being too terrified to move or breathe were left behind in my childhood. I've been through too much and it has hardened some primal part of me that no longer panics.
Patricia Cornwell
#35. If you can create a weapon that causes enough fear the fear itself can cause damage that's as paralyzing and destructive as any physical device like a bomb or a laser gun. Fear can make decent people behave irrationally and violently.
Patricia Cornwell
#36. Certainly the Ripper liked to believe he was actually doing the world a favor by ridding it of "vermin," as he put it. In his mind, his victims were "whores" who got what they deserved.
Patricia Cornwell
#37. rights are honored only in the breach. most people don't get agents or cops assigned to them until they're already raped or dead.
Patricia Cornwell
#38. Most of what went wrong in the Ripper investigation was due to ignorance.
Patricia Cornwell
#39. Gravity will get you. Life is inclined toward falling. Not standing or flying, indeed, barely sitting.
Patricia Cornwell
#40. We rarely are conscious of those primitive anxieties that creep out from under reason. And the only way to banish them is to turn on all the lights.
Patricia Cornwell
#41. Isolation is the cruelest of punishments, and it had never occurred to me that I was something less than human because I wasn't a man.
Patricia Cornwell
#43. Odors have their own story to tell and the secret is to block them out after they're no longer relevant.
Patricia Cornwell
#44. Do no harm and leave the world a better place than you found it.
Patricia Cornwell
#45. Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it.
Patricia Cornwell
#46. As was true with every powerful person I had known, and there were but a few, his greatness made him humble and kind.
Patricia Cornwell
#47. Murder is about power and the more powerful women get the more it will change the good that they do and the bad that they do.
Patricia Cornwell
#49. I constantly remind people that crime isn't solved by technology; it's solved by people.
Patricia Cornwell
#52. Tactical engagement principle number one is if you don't have a clear and decisive objective the operation becomes disconnected and unfocused.
Patricia Cornwell
#53. I tended to hold love hostage in my heart because, if expressed, I feared it might abandon me as many people in my life had.
Patricia Cornwell
#55. I find it difficult to attend autopsies. Especially the smells.
Patricia Cornwell
#56. I disagreed. Some people feel things more deeply than others, and some people feel things the rest of us don't. This is what causes isolation, the sense of being apart, different
Patricia Cornwell
#57. You've been drawing from a well that you never knew was bottomless and you just found out the unlimited depth of inhumanity,
Patricia Cornwell
#58. you?" "Jealousy. It's toxic." "How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again." "You need to start putting this on every time you go out, even on overcast days in the dead of winter." The viscous translucent lotion Carrie dribbles into her palm looks like semen. "And
Patricia Cornwell
#59. You can't cure a chipped plate. All you can do is live with it or throw it out.
Patricia Cornwell
#60. Confessing I didn't, I scribbled the directions on the notepad I always kept by the phone. I hung up and my feet were already on the floor as adrenaline hit my nerves like espresso. The house was quiet. I grabbed my black medical bag, scuffed and worn from years of use. The
Patricia Cornwell
#61. She can love one minute and feel nothing the next, not even anger or pain, because after a while those, too, will pass.
Patricia Cornwell
#62. I wouldn't want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely
Patricia Cornwell
#64. Disrespect is a symptom of weakness, of smallness, of an existential problem. By acting rude to me he's showing me what he really thinks of himself.
Patricia Cornwell
#65. If it's really beautiful weather, sometimes I might take a helicopter out. I got my license in 1999.
Patricia Cornwell
#67. When terrorists find something that works they keep on doing it. It's predictable.
Patricia Cornwell
#68. two blocks down from my house? What the hell is going on?" "Nothing good," Marino says. I Google Sonny's Lawn Care. There's no such
Patricia Cornwell
#69. But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man - God forbid I should give them up.
Patricia Cornwell
#70. What's Mark working on in Denver?" "I have no idea. Some special
Patricia Cornwell
#71. Even if you are a best-seller you feel insecure because it is all so unpredictable.
Patricia Cornwell
#73. Aggression is about competing. Competing for the male, for the female, competing for the person most fit for breeding. Competing for resources such as food and shelter. Competing for power, because without hierarchy there can't be social order. In other words, aggression occurs when it's profitable.
Patricia Cornwell
#74. Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will.
Patricia Cornwell
#75. Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful.
Patricia Cornwell
#76. been ignited by loose talk, by leaks," Amburgey went on, "the fact the city
Patricia Cornwell
#77. When you dine with the devil use a long spoon, and I've repeatedly preached that to him, too.
Patricia Cornwell
#79. Eddie Heath had come in naked with IV needles, catheter, and dressings still in place. They
Patricia Cornwell
#80. Witnessed the moment of recognition that it was over or it wasn't. The look was never exactly the same. Rage, hate, shock, grief, anguish, terror, scorn, amusement, combinations of them, and nothing. As different as people are different.
Patricia Cornwell
#82. -it's the d-isomer of a compound, the name of which won't mean anything to you-
-oh, yeah? how do you know it won't mean nothing to me?
-three-methoxy-n-methylmorphinan
-you're right. don't mean a dam thing to me
Patricia Cornwell
#85. I've had people turn up to book signings with knives, with guns.
Patricia Cornwell
#86. A significant portion of the human race has no idea what it is like to be attached to short legs, and I am forever finding myself indignantly pumping along like a handcar in a world of express trains.
Patricia Cornwell
#87. Perhaps my greatest shame was that I could not show what I should, and I worried no one would ever know how much I cared. Crows
Patricia Cornwell
#89. Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son's attention to a memorial. "There's a name you will never remember," Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read:
Patricia Cornwell
#90. The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can't create, we'll destroy, and once we've done it, once is not enough.
Patricia Cornwell
#91. I reel in an uncanny intoxication of emotions, on minute bewildered and then frightened then the next, I swing from exhaustion to mania, from depression to tranquility and beneath it all, excitement fizzes as if my blood is filled with gas.
Patricia Cornwell
#93. Maybe nothing phased her until she was beaten to death on her marble floor, and I envision a blitz attack.
Patricia Cornwell
#94. Any place where they got to vote on whether English is the official language don't belong in the United States.
Patricia Cornwell
#95. If you chomp down too hard on my work, you're going to break your teeth.
Patricia Cornwell
#96. point is, he wants to hurt you, doc, and he's already trying hard. one way or another he's going to screw you, if he can."
"he can wait in line with all the other people who want to.
Patricia Cornwell
#97. The older I got, the more I was of the opinion that love can be experienced in many different ways. There is no right or wrong way to love, only in how it is expressed.
Patricia Cornwell
#98. And suddenly the world was filled with wooden faces and flat voices - and, you were alone.
Patricia Cornwell
#99. On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.
Patricia Cornwell
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