Serial Killer Quotes

“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Life is merely a series of moments and is in fact an unflinching serial killer, since it kills steadily each moment one after the other. Memory is the only survivor. (“Just for a moment”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)”
― Tim Dorsey, Hurricane Punch

“Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane.”
― Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

“She stared at me "You have a message," she said. "On you machine."
I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective.
"It's some girl," La Guerta said. "She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?" there was a strange hint of a challenge in her voice.
"You know how it is," I said. "Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head." Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn't help thinking of the woman's head flung at me not so long ago.
"Watch out," La Guerta said. "Sooner or later one of them will stick." I had no idea what she thought that meant, but it was a very unsettling image.
"I'm sure you're right," I said. "Until then, carpe diem."
"What?"
"It's Latin," I said. "It means, complain in the daylight.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“Rory: "People are being serious."

Jazza: "There's a serial killer out there. Of course people are being serious."

Rory: "Yeah, but what are the chances?"

Jazza: "I bet all of the victims thought that."

Rory: "But still, what are the chances?"

Jazza: "Well, I imagine they are several million to one."

Jerome: "Not that high. You're only dealing with a small part of London. And while there might be a million or more people in that area, the Ripper is probably focusing on women, because all of the original victims were women. So halve that--"

Jazza: "You really need another hobby.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star

“He should have recognized that what really fascinated him was the hunt, the adventure of searching out his victims. And, to a degree, possessing them physically, as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual.”
― Ted Bundy

“For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“SWAT? For me?" Still trembling, one hand clung to the ambulance gurney, the other held a massive sterilised cotton wool wad under my nose.
"Tactical Support was busy. You got Dennis and Arlo," said Harry, speed-reading the papers he'd snatched from inside my jacket.
Closest his hands had been to my chest in a long time.
"Which one broke my nose?"
"That'd be Dennis.”
― Morana Blue, Gatsby's Smile

“It doesn't escape him that the rock holding it up is the perfect fit for his fist. Or how easily one of those needle spokes would slide right through the girl's eye like Jell-O.”
― Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls

“This was it. This was what I had never felt before--an emotional connection to another human being. I'd tried kindness, I'd tried love, I'd tried friendship. I'd tried talking and sharing and watching, and nothing had ever worked until now. Until fear. I felt her fear in every inch of my body like an electric hum, and I was alive for the first time. I needed more right then or the craving would eat me alive.”
― Dan Wells, I Am Not a Serial Killer

“She was sitting at the kitchen table, naked. She had a chopper in her right hand. Her left hand was flat on the able in front of her. She’d chopped off her thumb, index and middle fingers. They were in a neat row on the table, which was thick with dark blood.”
― Barry Graham, Of Darkness and Light

“I don't laugh very much," he said, realizing the truth of the statement as he made it, this sudden bit of knowledge disturbing him.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“Always make people feel like they're the ones in control. It will make it all the more tempting when they realize, they're not.”
― Alexis Grace, Killer of Mine

“He knew how to dispatch his own bull, on his own terms; he could avoid danger once enough punishment had been inflicted.”
― Rachael Adam, Sangre De Toro

“Hold onto your ankles. Keep yourself in place.” She opens her mouth to protest, but I shut that down right away. “Do I need to remind you that you have two very sharp knives right beside your head? Want to feel one against your throat instead?”
― Dolores Lane, Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick

“Hmm. Is this Bogdan's downside? He's a serial murderer? That would be tough to overlook. Not impossible though, given those shoulders.”
― Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed

“I especially liked it when, at the end, they begged for their lives. When they did that—and they all did that eventually—I would pretend to hesitate and see in their eyes the glimmer of a final, desperate hope. I let them have that for an instant. Then, I took it away. That—that extinguishing of their very last hope—I savored more than anything, even more than the extinguishing of their lives.
You see, it was at that moment they could feel the presence of the Devil and would beg God to come and deliver them from him. And it was in that moment that I made them see—that they finally realized—God had been there all along. It was then they understood: the Devil was just God in his night attire.”
― Craig Russell, The Devil Aspect

“He must have an utter devotion to his twisted passions, above anything else in the world. He can have no conscience. In his world only he matters. And it is perhaps not so large a step from there to persuading yourself that God himself has set you the task you so enjoy.”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“How can a woman be Law-Struck for real unless she remains
Law-Struck Still.”
― Slona North, Law Struck Still

“When they had smiled at the camera, all fresh-faced and with a clear map for their bright futures, did they secretly have a glimpse of what was to come, like we, the reader do? Was there ever any inkling, as the flash popped, that this photo would one day end up in the pages of a book about a serial killer? If so, was there any way I could possess that knowledge ahead of time, just in case the same fate was destined to befall me?”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Joe “Hunt” Gamsky still purports to be a devotee of Yogananda and is visited occasionally by members of Ananda Church of Self-Realization. I wonder, if they or anyone ever asks Joe how it felt to strangle poor little Richard Mayer; Or how he feels about getting away with that now?”
― Randall Sullivan, The Price of Experience

“Joe Hunt said he just kept shooting, a lot of times. He said that at one point Ron Levin's brain jumped out of his skull and fell on his chest. Joe seemed like he thought that was kind of neat in a weird way, as if it had surprised him. He was very casual when he was telling me all of this, matter-of-fact, except when he laughed about the brain.”
― Randall Sullivan, The Price of Experience: Money, Power, Image, and Murder in Los Angeles

“I wonder if anyone watches me, if someone across the street sees the glow of my bedroom, the silhouette of my canopy, the flick of my vape light, the press of my palm against glass. Do they see a girl? Or do they see the monster inside the maiden?

I could be your neighbor. I could be the one who waves at your dog, the one who compliments your shoes on the train, the one who holds the door for your precious daughter.

And I could be the last thing you ever see.”
― Lee Stackhouse, Diary of a Damsel Dame

“I could tie someone up with that silk scarf and throw him into the river, his bloated body bobbing up in the morning to spoil the tourists’ breakie.

I could stab someone’s eardrums in with the stiletto of my candy-pink heels.

I could slit someone’s eyeballs open with my mermaid scale sequin bomber jacket.
And I’d look fabulous doing it.

I think about that sometimes. The utility of beauty.”
― Lee Stackhouse, Diary of a Damsel Dame

“People like them never expect darkness to crawl into their perfect lives.

Robots, both of them, NPCs wandering around in the matrix as a reminder to fall in line with the made up fallacy of an American Dream—a nickname for an idea so perfectly aligned with its inevitable destiny of doom it sounds preplanned.

They pose as a remnant of the nuclear family, an idiotic ideal that catastrophically blew apart nearly immediately after conception—an intelligent design behind the hellscape we know as society.”
― Lee Stackhouse, Diary of a Damsel Dame

“Loneliness was never meant for the living; it was especially designed for the dying by Satan himself.

Whether we’re surrounded by loved ones or not, it’s only the one slipping into the next world that is experiencing death.

Dying is the loneliest moment of anyone’s life—and everyone seems hell-bent on getting there as fast as possible.”
― Lee Stackhouse