Patricia Cornwell > Quotes

“Do no harm and leave the world a better place than you found it.”
― Patricia Cornwell

“rain slowly slides down the glass as if the night is crying.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Trace

“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, The Body Farm

“The dead have never bothered me. It's the living that I fear.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Survival my only hope. Success my only revenge”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm.”
― Patricia Cornwell, The Body Farm

“We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple..”
― Patricia Cornwell, The Last Precinct

“You have to live where you wake up, even if someone else dreamed you there.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Red Mist

“Leaves covered pavement like soggy cereal.”
― Patricia Cornwell, The Body Farm

“What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“You artists think you’re the only ones who can relate to these things. Many of us have the same feelings, the same emptiness, the same loneliness. But we don’t have the tools to verbalize them. So we carry on, we struggle. Feelings are feelings. I think people’s feelings are pretty much the same all over the world.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man - God forbid I should give them up.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?”
― Patricia Cornwell, Body of Evidence

“I feel something change in me... I feel a flat calm, a detachment, the way I get when something is too much and yet l must function and in fact function at the highest level. I know what I'm in for, only a fool wouldn't know that...”
― Patricia Cornwell, Red Mist

“The world is full of people who mean no harm and cause a great deal of it.”
― Patricia Cornwell, From Potter's Field

“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, Postmortem

“And suddenly the world was filled with wooden faces and flat voices - and, you were alone.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

“Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upsets”
― Patricia Cornwell, Trace

“No, Lucy. Your mother doesn’t really love men. They are a symptom of her obsessive quest of finding somebody who will make her whole. She doesn’t understand that she has to make herself whole.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Cruel and Unusual

“I was consumed, too, not by the dying but by the dead.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like, Anna tosses Nietzsche's quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.”
― Patricia Cornwell, The Last Precinct

“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, The Last Precinct

“You know what the best security system is? Window shades.”
― Patricia Cornwell

“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, Postmortem

“The truth is none of us always does what’s right or fair.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Flesh and Blood

“Blood squirted as his transected femoral artery haemorrhaged to the rhythm of his horrible heart.
- From Potter's Field”
― Patricia Cornwell, From Potter's Field

“being in love brings out both the best and the worst in us. One day we’re generous and sensitive to a fault, and the next we’re not fit to shoot. Our lives become lessons in extremes.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Cruel and Unusual

“People can burn and beat love out of you. They really can kill it, and it’s not your fault you don’t feel it anymore, and how liberating it is to finally realize that. Love isn’t for better or for worse, through thick or thin. It damn well shouldn’t be.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Red Mist

“And in an odd way, realizing all this has given me an unexpected satisfaction and a little more self-respect. I have changed, and it’s for the better. You really can’t love unconditionally. People can burn and beat love out of you. They really can kill it, and it’s not your fault you don’t feel it anymore, and how liberating it is to finally realize that. Love isn’t for better or for worse, through thick or thin. It damn well shouldn’t be.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Red Mist