Top 35 Ann Rule Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Lazy people tend not to take chances, but express themselves by tearing down other’s work.”

— Ann Rule

2. “Don’t confuse me with the facts – I’ve already made up my mind.”

— Ann Rule

3. “I always say that bad women are fewer than men, but when you get one, they’re fascinating because they’re so rotten.”

— Ann Rule

4. “I always want to give the victim a voice.”

— Ann Rule

5. “Try to open up your mind a little, and move away from rigid opinions of what people should do and be – unless you have been there.”

— Ann Rule

6. “Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that “to have children is to give hostages to fate.”

— Ann Rule

7. “I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away.”

— Ann Rule

8. “Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.”

— Ann Rule

9. “There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.”

— Ann Rule

10. “Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”

— Ann Rule

11. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another’s pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.”

— Ann Rule

12. “Choices are like dominoes, one tumbling against the next and then the next until events go out of human control.”

— Ann Rule

13. “Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.”

— Ann Rule

14. “He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.”

— Ann Rule

15. “Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.”

— Ann Rule

16. “The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”

— Ann Rule

17. “And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted’s needs. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.”

— Ann Rule

18. “Detective Norman M. Chapman, Jr., was on call that night. Chapman is a man with a voice like warm maple syrup.”

— Ann Rule

19. “Looking back, we see it is often casual choices which chart a path to tragedy.”

— Ann Rule

20. “I asked him if there was any effective treatment for people like Bundy. “He paused for a moment and said, ‘Only a sledgehammer between the eyes.”

— Ann Rule

21. “Crazy gets better; consciences don’t grow back, and narcissists and histrionics never learn to give up center stage or their beloved mirrors.”

— Ann Rule

22. “The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, ‘Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.’ The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”

— Ann Rule

23. “The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how.”

— Ann Rule

24. “The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close: But the rose’s scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose. – Francis Thompson.”

— Ann Rule

25. “I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain – not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.”

— Ann Rule

26. “Although her parents didn’t know it, Debra had gotten a prescription for birth control pills at Planned Parenthood when she was only ten.”

— Ann Rule

27. “The lesson is clear: Pay attention to your dog!”

— Ann Rule

28. “You cannot step over a mountain,” she told me, “but if you step over pebble by pebble, you’ll look back and the mountain will be behind you.”

— Ann Rule

29. “Recent research into the problem shows that three percent of all American males are considered antisocial, while only one percent of women are. Interestingly, little boys tend to show sociopathic traits early in childhood, while girls with antisocial personality disorders rarely exhibit symptoms before the onset of puberty.”

— Ann Rule

30. “She reminded Kevin again that she had forced herself to turn and walk away from him when everything in her wanted to stay.”

— Ann Rule

31. “If, as many people believe today, Ted Bundy took lives, he also saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it.”

— Ann Rule

32. “It made natural headlines. Prostitutes being murdered suggested a titillating story. Moreover, citizens, living in nice safe houses, whose wives and daughters were never alone on the streets could be reassured.”

— Ann Rule

33. “On the surface, at least, it seemed that I had more problems than Ted did. He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.”

— Ann Rule

34. “Ted Bundy waving to the camera while the charges against him are being read. He told reporters, “I will be heard!”

— Ann Rule

35. “He was all that mattered to him.”

— Ann Rule

36. “As soon as he stopped, I poked him with my umbrella and said ‘f – you!’ and got out real fast.”

— Ann Rule

37. “MOST OF US have harbored a fantasy wherein we return to confront a lost first love, and, in that reunion, we have become better looking, thinner, richer, utterly desirable – so desirable that our lost love realizes instantly that he has made a terrible mistake.”

— Ann Rule

38. “Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected – demanded – that she be totally loyal to him.”

— Ann Rule