Quotessence
Home / Topics / True Crime Quotes

True Crime Quotes

Browse 232 quotes about True Crime.

True Crime Quotes

“Sept 27-69-6.30 by knife by Stewart Stafford I am the thief on the golden hill, Predator in sight, a hooded chill, Masked, armed and primed to strike, Prey pinned by the lake, as I like. Tie them up on blankets, used, In time they'll see it's all a ruse, Pretend to leave, then come back, Back-slashed in a frenzied attack. Left to die, their assailant gone, Darkness falls on two bleeding fawns, Stagger up the hill to try and get aid, Passing out as the lifeforce fades. Flashlight in the eyes, back for the kill! Help arrives, shakily standing still, Message on his car, Zodiac was here, He lived, she passed, and then only fear. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”

EvilMysteryCrimeMurderMurder MysteryTrue CrimeSerial Killer1969Unsolved MysteryZodiac Killer
Author:Stewart Stafford
Create image

“I familiarize myself with every detail of their crimes and loathe what they did. At the same time, I may feel tremendous empathy and sorrow for what they went through in their young lives that contributed to their adult behavior”

PsychologyEmpathyTrue CrimeSerial Killers
Book:The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter
Create image

“Powder Burns by Stewart Stafford A lone boy prowls a murky sandbar, The cataract sky, judgemental kin, A wrecking-ball life's flattened vista— Any hopeful resolution growing thin. Alley dice swallowed all naïveté, Fixed or cursed, he remained unsure, Surreptitious bone-white erotic charge, Legacy besmirched by fame impure. A neon safari hunt of the vanished, Luring victims to his flytrap home, Murderous brief interval to loneliness, A purring predator refusing to atone. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

DarkCrimeLonelinessHorrorMurderNoirTrue CrimeSerial KillerPsychological ThrillerDennis Nilsen
Author:Stewart Stafford
Create image

“The plain and perhaps regrettable fact is that it is part of the eternal human psyche and cycle for the normal individual to derive cathartic satisfaction and enjoyment from savouring the crimes of others, and from luxuriously dreaming of personally committing them. Similar cathartic satisfaction is afforded by contemplating the punishment of those who are caught. Nobody likes a loser and therefore we believe they get what they deserve. What do you believe you deserve for the undetected crimes and secret moral outrages you have committed in thought or action? Absolution?”

SocietyMoralityNarcissismTrue CrimeDouble StandardsCriminality
Book:The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis
Create image

“When reading the mind it is easier to catch an innocent than a guilty. One more inaccuracy of the mechanism. Because the innocent has remorses for something that happened without their will or control and constantly remembers things that could render them guilty from sense of ethics while the guilty has never remorses for something that happened with their will or generally. Or never worries.”

PhilosophyLife LessonsJusticePsychologyGuiltInnocentGuiltyInnocenceNonfictionTrue Crime
Book:You Are Always Innocent
Create image

“He was shot in the chest while sitting in a friend’s car in Scottsdale. The killing was somehow related to drugs, no one knows exactly how. Or maybe Sophia knows, but she’s not admitting to it. She talks about him in glowing terms, describes their relationship as “perfect”, and yet says he used to hit her. Things weren’t easy when he was alive, and they haven’t gotten easier since his death. She works in her family’s restaurant and doesn’t have much money, which is why she still lives in the barrio. She tells me about a time when she woke in the middle of the night and found a man in her bedroom. He’d broken in through a window. She screamed at him to get out, and he said, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” and left. She now keeps a gun under her bed.”

LoveSexMemoirDeath PenaltyPhoenixArizonaTrue CrimeWitnessing Death
Book:Why I Watch People Die
Create image

“Soon it will be different. Soon there will be a night when we’re in my car and she’s screaming, raging, stabbing herself in the arm with a knife she’s pulled from her purse. Blood all over her, me and the dashboard. Me tearing up my shirt to bind her arm with. Her crying and saying she’s sorry. Everything being different, and then there being nothing between us.”

LoveSexMemoirPhoenixArizonaTrue CrimeWitnessing Death
Book:Why I Watch People Die
Create image

“Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser”

True CrimePsychological ThrillerBased On A True StoryNonfiction NovelAn American Tragedy
Book:An American Tragedy
Create image

“Oh God! Ray will kill me.” She ran into the bathroom, showered, and dressed. “What will you tell your husband?” Jack asked when he kissed her in the doorway. “That I was shopping.” “Won’t he notice you’re not bringing anything home?” She laughed. She dashed out the door, tired but satisfied. When Ray approached her that night, she grimaced, finding his advances almost unendurable.”

MysteryMurderTrue CrimeInfidelity In MarriageBased On A True Story
Book:Rock and Roll Murders: An Entrepreneur Finds That Murder is No Business Solution
Create image

“He could have killed me for the blunder— which really wasn’t my fault— but I was lucky , and he gave me another chance. The two officers who questioned him were also incredibly lucky for not having had any idea who it was they’d been questioning.”

CrimeLuckyPoliceOfficersQuestioningTrue CrimeCriminalPolice OfficersFaultKilledBreaking The LawCriminal MindsCriminal BehaviorBlunderCriminal Mindset
Book:The Toughest Prison of All
Create image

“Un falco vola nel cielo bianco dell’estate. Sospeso, con le ali spalancate, immobile. D’un tratto precipita verso terra, a una velocità che l’occhio umano fatica a seguire. Vipere aggrovigliate fuggono dal loro nido. Il rapace le artiglia e torna in cielo, batte le ali e scompare. Tre bambini corrono sul sentiero che dal paese conduce alla spiaggia. Hanno appena distrutto il nido delle vipere rapite. È il loro passatempo preferito. Sfasciare il nido dei serpenti velenosi, col rischio di essere morsi, li eccita. È come sfidare la morte. Ma la morte, per i bambini, è soltanto una parola.”

ThrillerNoirTrue CrimeMorteAmiciziaIncipitBambiniCitazioniFalcoSerpenti
Book:Chi ha polvere spara
Create image

“Even adults who were stiffened by the starch of their miserable lives, for whom breaking the stony discipline of austere and judgmental intolerance was usually off the table, melted in the magical luminescence and energetic charm of the pre-pubescent Ruka.”

JapanIntrigueNigeriaTrue CrimeKenyaMystery ThrillerJapanese CultureUgandaDrug CartelsDrug Trafficking
Book:Love Connection: Romance in the Land of the Rising Sun
Create image

“The regular choreography, entrances and exits of blooms in stages such that the garden looked like an ever-evolving carousel of swirling rainbows and radiant butterflies, seemed condensed. All of the flowers still obeyed some silent urgent command to make their debut. But this year, it definitely unfolded more quickly, as if racing to meet a new compelling deadline.”

JapanIntrigueNigeriaTrue CrimeKenyaHaruki MurakamiMystery ThrillerUgandaDrug CartelsDrug Trafficking
Book:Love Connection: Romance in the Land of the Rising Sun
Create image

“It was the fundamental bifurcation of the masses of human meat into two starkly opposite classes: the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots had barely anything. The haves had it all. The haves had everything except concern and compassion for the have-nots, who they regarded as little more than cockroaches.”

JapanIntrigueNigeriaTrue CrimeKenyaHaruki MurakamiMystery ThrillerUgandaDrug CartelsDrug Trafficking
Book:Love Connection: Romance in the Land of the Rising Sun
Create image

“I propose that an area of no more than 300 square miles, centered roughly upon Henley-on-Thames, has made this quintessentially British town Britain's 'small town and village murder capital'.”

HistoryCrimeLondonTrue CrimeOxfordGreat BritainUnited KingdomRiver ThamesThe United Kingdom
Book:BINOCLARITY: A travel along the length of the River Thames and into the heart of the British psyche
Create image