Top 200 Karin Slaughter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. – Mexican Proverb.”

— Karin Slaughter

2. “If you love someone, you don’t go out of your way to hurt them. You don’t torture them. You don’t terrify them or make them live in constant fear. That’s not how love works. It’s not how normal people work.”

— Karin Slaughter

3. “Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.”

— Karin Slaughter

4. “You can only make decisions with the information you have at the time.”

— Karin Slaughter

5. “Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It’s why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It’s why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.”

— Karin Slaughter

6. “People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same.”

— Karin Slaughter

7. “A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.”

— Karin Slaughter

8. “You didn’t realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.”

— Karin Slaughter

9. “Even Gone With the Wind had a shocking, cold-blooded murder.”

— Karin Slaughter

10. “An autopsy was an act of violence itself, the ultimate invasion. Every body tells a story. A person’s life and death can be exposed in all their glory and shame simply by looking beneath the skin.”

— Karin Slaughter

11. “He said that children always have different parents, even in the same family.”

— Karin Slaughter

12. “She took him for granted sometimes. That was the luxury of a long marriage. But she knew that she loved him. She needed him. He was the anchor that kept her from drifting away.”

— Karin Slaughter

13. “It’s the curse of the motherless child. We seek comfort from the very people who do us harm.”

— Karin Slaughter

14. “Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”

— Karin Slaughter

15. “Suddenly, quite miraculously, you are a grown-up beautiful woman. You look so much like your mother, but you are still uniquely you. You have thoughts I will never know. Desires I will never understand. Friends I will never meet. Passions I will never share. You have a life. You have an entire world in front of you.”

— Karin Slaughter

16. “Ultimately, I’m in control of what’s going on in the books, so I can back off, if it’s scaring me too much.”

— Karin Slaughter

17. “In a rare moment of candor, he had once told her that being in a library was like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.”

— Karin Slaughter

18. “The world stops for you when you’re pretty. That’s why women spend billions on crap for their faces. Their whole life, they’re the center of attention. People want to be around them just because they’re attractive. Their jokes are funnier. Their lives are better. And then suddenly, they get bags under their eyes or they put on a little weight and no one cares about them anymore. They cease to exist.”

— Karin Slaughter

19. “Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next Gone With the Wind.”

— Karin Slaughter

20. “You gotta go through a special kind of hell or a special kind of love to change who you are inside.”

— Karin Slaughter

21. “He had always said there was nothing that a list couldn’t solve. Conquer the details and you conquer the problem.”

— Karin Slaughter

22. “There is kindness in so many unexpected places.”

— Karin Slaughter

23. “She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand.”

— Karin Slaughter

24. “He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies, But no one really understands that the real danger is truth.”

— Karin Slaughter

25. “Only... ever... you.”

— Karin Slaughter

26. “As hard as it was to hold on to things, it was even harder to let them go.”

— Karin Slaughter

27. “It didn’t take a Harvard economist to figure out that it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who’s fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.”

— Karin Slaughter

28. “Yeah?” “I miss the way you taste.” She tried to sound bored. “It’s still Colgate.” “That’s not the taste I was talking about.”

— Karin Slaughter

29. “Then again, Paul had once told her that there was no such thing as coincidence. “The Law of Truly Large Numbers provides that given a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing can happen.”

— Karin Slaughter

30. “She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.”

— Karin Slaughter

31. “Flowers in the Attic.”

— Karin Slaughter

32. “They’ll only get your goat if you show them where you keep your hay.”

— Karin Slaughter

33. “That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”

— Karin Slaughter

34. “Optimism is a sliver of glass in your heart.”

— Karin Slaughter

35. “Alafair Burke understands the criminal mind. Long Gone is both an education and an entertainment of the first order. This is a very clever and very smart novel by a very clever and smart writer. The dialogue crackles, the plot is intriguing, and the pacing is perfect.”

— Karin Slaughter

36. “A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial.”

— Karin Slaughter

37. “Age is a cruel punishment for youth.”

— Karin Slaughter

38. “Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.”

— Karin Slaughter

39. “I never felt isolated; I just liked being alone. I think that some people are good at being alone, and some people arent, and as a child, I really liked it.”

— Karin Slaughter

40. “The older sister could have been an overachiever who cast the kind of shadow in which nothing could grow.”

— Karin Slaughter

41. “I think that people do things for a reason – that we have mental illness, that we have genetic wiring that can get triggered by certain environmental factors.”

— Karin Slaughter

42. “I loved him. I know you don’t want to believe that, but I really, truly, giddy, heart-breaking, longing, achingly loved him.”

— Karin Slaughter

43. “Your mother and I had always been secretly pleased that you were so headstrong and passionate about your causes. Once you were gone, we understood that these were the qualities that painted young men as smart and ambitious and young women as trouble.”

— Karin Slaughter

44. “First you must have the images. Then come the words.” – Robert James Waller.”

— Karin Slaughter

45. “I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: that restless feeling dissolves like butter.”

— Karin Slaughter

46. “This is where feminism had gotten her: locked in the back of a sticky squad car with the skirt on her tennis dress riding up her thighs.”

— Karin Slaughter

47. “Love, like water, always flowed down the path of least resistance.”

— Karin Slaughter

48. “She had always believed – vehemently, with great conviction – that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.”

— Karin Slaughter

49. “Never share a bathroom with a man.”

— Karin Slaughter

50. “Dr. Monroe and I realized very gradually that drug addiction is a terminal disease. It is a cancer that eats families alive.”

— Karin Slaughter