Top 40 Cherie Priest Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’ve heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We’d see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.”

— Cherie Priest

2. “I hate to make the comparison here, but think of me as one of those expensive boutiques. If you have to ask about the cost, you probably can’t afford me.”

— Cherie Priest

3. “You’re a smart boy. Or if you’re not, you ought to be.”

— Cherie Priest

4. “Sure he’s dead, and it’s a good thing for us. It’s hard to argue with a dead man. A dead man can’t change his mind or make new rules, or behave like a bastard so no one will listen to him anymore. A dead man stays a saint.”

— Cherie Priest

5. “It’s funny what they say about men in uniform – how people think women just can’t resist ’em. Fact is, I think we’re just pleased to see a man groomed, bathed, and wearing clothes that fit him.”

— Cherie Priest

6. “It was a train full of strangers, and they were all the same.”

— Cherie Priest

7. “Steampunk is what happens when goths discover brown.”

— Cherie Priest

8. “Without temptation, there was no virtue in resistance.”

— Cherie Priest

9. “I hate meeting new people even new clients who intend to give me money. I try to be pleasant but I’m not very good at it. The best I can usually pull off is ‘professional if somewhat chilly.’ It’s not ideal no. But it beats ’awkward and bitchy.”

— Cherie Priest

10. “He smiled when he talked, a smile that was not completely cold, but was the professional smile of a man who spends his days answering easy questions for people whom he’d rather usher out of his office via catapult.”

— Cherie Priest

11. “Every affair is a fairy tale or a tragedy.”

— Cherie Priest

12. “I’d seen better days, but I wasn’t about to instigate widespread panic with my appearance, either. I made a show of washing up and pretending that I was an ordinary, civilized woman who was, perhaps, recovering from a bad date – and who had most certainly not been hiding bodies in anybody’s basement.”

— Cherie Priest

13. “It sounded like a good idea at the time, which is probably going to be on my tombstone – along with a catty footnote about poor impulse control. But.”

— Cherie Priest

14. “Sometimes, everyone is right. Not always and not even usually, but once in a while, everyone is right.”

— Cherie Priest

15. “In California there were nuggets the size of walnuts lying on the ground – or so it was said, and truth travels slowly when rumors have wings of gold.”

— Cherie Priest

16. “He hadn’t found what he’d meant to find, but his need to swipe and hoard something had been appeased for now.”

— Cherie Priest

17. “Vision is also a fickle creature. You can see an object a hundred times, a thousand times, and it remains unchanged. Then in one swift second you realize it has been changing all along and your eyes hid it from you.”

— Cherie Priest

18. “It’s a very fine line indeed, and a seductive message at its core: God loves some of us, and is coming for us – and he’ll destroy everything and everyone we don’t like. It’s a great galactic game of “Just wait until your Father gets home!”

— Cherie Priest

19. “Father, forgive me – for I know precisely what I’m doing.”

— Cherie Priest

20. “You know, everything’s a ghost story, eventually.”

— Cherie Priest

21. “The distance between an honest Christian mystic and a fortune-teller is sometimes less than half a whisper. Less than a pot of tea or the space between two book covers.”

— Cherie Priest

22. “She wielded it easily, lightly. She carried it swinging like a baseball bat, only with more poetry to it. It was a frightening thing to watch, this small shadow of billowing grey fabric and sprawling, wild hair splaying out behind her, the axe held at the ready with both hands, poised and prepared.”

— Cherie Priest

23. “I would let the whole town think I’m a madwoman and a murderer, let it scorn and reject me, let its children compose hateful rhymes to be sung whilst jumping rope.”

— Cherie Priest

24. “Last century’s magic is this year’s science.”

— Cherie Priest

25. “I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. It’s ridiculous.”

— Cherie Priest

26. “We need him dead or in jail, and I’m probably a crappy murderer. – Libby.”

— Cherie Priest

27. “And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.”

— Cherie Priest

28. “Boys disobey their parents with such great regularity that it’s barely worth a comment; and if yours is talented enough to rebel in such grand fashion, then you ought to consider it a point of pride that he’s such a sharp lad.”

— Cherie Priest

29. “In my career I’ve had my hands upon more revolting bodies than a layman is likely to encounter in a lifetime of trying. I’ve squeezed boils, soaked my hands in blood and pus, slipped in entrails, swaddled slippery stillborns, and pulled excrement from unwilling bowels by hand.”

— Cherie Priest

30. “Why the world won’t accommodate my every whim, I just don’t know.”

— Cherie Priest

31. “Barringtons aren’t local by origin. They’re carpetbaggers from Philadelphia – an offshoot of a House that had grown too big to govern. Or more to the point, it’d grown too big for everyone to successfully get along without a whole lot of murdering going on.”

— Cherie Priest

32. “I guess because, well, just because it was able to evolve. When it couldn’t be one thing anymore, it became something else and kept on living that way.”

— Cherie Priest

33. “I’d learned that Holtzer Point was a top secret facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d gathered that much already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a series of websites that appeared to have been composed by middle-school-aged conspiracy theorists with a passion for stupid-looking animated graphics.”

— Cherie Priest

34. “Yes it’s pink. That’s how you know it’s for ladies. That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

— Cherie Priest

35. “She’d grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.”

— Cherie Priest

36. “She was a decent storyteller, but a crap liar, for all the sense that made.”

— Cherie Priest

37. “And if there are gods after all, perhaps we should not struggle so hard to get their attention, if this is the attention they would lavish upon us.”

— Cherie Priest

38. “Either birds or bats flapped up and into the night as the gates rolled back into position. My money was on bats. Little blingy ones, carrying tiny Louis Vuitton clutches.”

— Cherie Priest

39. “She was thirty-five, and she did not look a minute younger.”

— Cherie Priest

40. “Even down here, money has plenty to say.”

— Cherie Priest

41. “If Mattel ever makes a Drag Queen Barbie, they damn well ought to pattern that doll’s proportions after Sister Rose. Those were legs that could crack a horse’s ribs, and they knew how to move.”

— Cherie Priest

42. “I met his eyes because I could not refuse them... they were the color of a storm clashing with a setting sun.”

— Cherie Priest

43. “He stayed close, and he stayed quiet. It was easy to do, almost; the silence above was so alarmingly complete that it was easier to keep it than to break it.”

— Cherie Priest

44. “Maybe we could do that whole “my enemy’s enemy” thing and skip off into the night, holding hands.”

— Cherie Priest

45. “You can learn a lot about someone by his teeth. Or her teeth. Especially vampires. For some of us, hygiene goes out the window when our body temperature drops. We might not need much in the way of deodorant, but I swear – a little Listerine never hurt anybody.”

— Cherie Priest

46. “There are worse things than minotaurs at the centre.”

— Cherie Priest

47. “The world is full of things we can’t control. All we can do is keep trying, keep working.”

— Cherie Priest