Top 200 Karin Slaughter Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “He had given weight to her life, tied her down to the world when her natural inclination had always been to float above everything, as if it were happening to someone else.”

— Karin Slaughter

152. “Sometimes, all you could do was pray for the strength to carry on.”

— Karin Slaughter

153. “People did not change their basic, core personalities.”

— Karin Slaughter

154. “Charlie watched her husband’s boss grip the sides of the podium like he was about to sodomize it.”

— Karin Slaughter

155. “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.”

— Karin Slaughter

156. “That’s what love is, Sara, when there are so many things about you that you only want one person in the world to know.”

— Karin Slaughter

157. “That is complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”

— Karin Slaughter

158. “She recited the only prayer Laura had ever taught her. “God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.”

— Karin Slaughter

159. “You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.”

— Karin Slaughter

160. “At this rate, the only way she was going to get laid was to crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait.”

— Karin Slaughter

161. “Claire had realized a long time ago that if you lie with enough conviction, you can usually fool yourself.”

— Karin Slaughter

162. “You are an enigma wrapped in a sticky bun.”

— Karin Slaughter

163. “People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same. Their personal demeanors. Their world outlook and political beliefs. One need only go to a high school reunion to verify the theory.”

— Karin Slaughter

164. “Neither of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.”

— Karin Slaughter

165. “They thought vengeance made it easier, when, in fact, all it did was fester the sorrow.”

— Karin Slaughter

166. “Getting drunk was something for the weak, a crutch for people who were not strong enough to live their own lives, to stand on their own two feet. Drinking was running away from something.”

— Karin Slaughter

167. “I was told you take your capital cases seriously down here.”

— Karin Slaughter

168. “My point is that you see these people in a way that I will never see them. Your experiences are no longer my experiences. I can’t guide you any longer because I don’t know where you’re going.”

— Karin Slaughter

169. “You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”

— Karin Slaughter

170. “Will hated those cops, had worked more than a few cases where he’d gotten them kicked off the force. You couldn’t say you were one of the good guys if you did the same thing the bad guys did.”

— Karin Slaughter

171. “Moon was from somewhere up east, the kind of place where consonants took on a life of their own. In addition to this, she spoke loudly and abruptly, two things that were considered very rude to southern ears.”

— Karin Slaughter

172. “People didn’t believe in you unless you convinced them that you believed in yourself.”

— Karin Slaughter

173. “You didn’t help chop up a two-hundred-fifty-pound man and still graduate at the top of your class without learning how to compartmentalize.”

— Karin Slaughter

174. “I love how you southern women say sweetheart like a yankee woman would say dumbass.”

— Karin Slaughter

175. “You are magnificent because you are so uniquely you.”

— Karin Slaughter

176. “Amanda was probably in her mid-fifties, a small woman, maybe five-three on a good day. Her attitude filled the room, and she walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter’s. She wore a simple diamond ring on her wedding finger, though Will knew she wasn’t currently married. She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young.”

— Karin Slaughter

177. “As she limped down the stairs, she considered all the drugs in her backpack. Tramadol, methadone, ketamine, buprenorphine. Mix them all into a pint of tequila and she could get a front-row seat to Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse talking about what a douche Jim Morrison could be.”

— Karin Slaughter

178. “Squirrels lose seventy-five percent of the nuts they bury. That’s how we get trees.” “Does now seem like an appropriate time for a nut metaphor?”

— Karin Slaughter

179. “Do what?” Buddy sounded flip. His eyes darted down to the wad of cash. “You got what you wanted.” She shook her head. She had never wanted this. She had wanted to feel safe. To feel protected. To have someone interested in her life, her thoughts, her dreams.”

— Karin Slaughter

180. “Dash was a stupid man’s idea of how a smart man sounded.”

— Karin Slaughter

181. “I miss anonymity. People have a right to disappear if they want to. It’s a personal decision, isn’t it? Everyone should have autonomy. We owe it to them as fellow human beings to support their decisions, even if we do not agree with them.”

— Karin Slaughter

182. “The man said, “The vaccine put microchips in my brain.” Callie confided, “I’m worried my cat is saving up to buy a motorcycle.”

— Karin Slaughter

183. “You get to a point where you look around and you ask yourself, ‘What is this doing to the rest of my family? What harm am I doing to my other children by concentrating all of my energy on rescuing this one child who will not be saved?”

— Karin Slaughter

184. “Personality shots,” her roommates used to call the first drinks of the night. Liquid courage. Whatever you called it, the point was to turn off the voice in your head that reminded you of everything wrong in your life.”

— Karin Slaughter

185. “Men never have to be uncomfortable around women. Women have to be uncomfortable around men all of the time.”

— Karin Slaughter

186. “I’m not sure,” Callie said. “As you know, cats choose not to talk because they’re afraid we’ll make them pay taxes.”

— Karin Slaughter

187. “It was a triptych, three canvases hinged together to make one image when it was open, another image when it was closed. He had always assumed she liked the duplicity of the piece. It was just like Angie, one thing inside, another out.”

— Karin Slaughter

188. “Leigh was constantly amazed when rich white people assumed the system always worked until they found themselves wrapped up in it. Then, it had to be some kind of God damned conspiracy.”

— Karin Slaughter

189. “How had her mother fallen in with these idiots?”

— Karin Slaughter

190. “In that moment, Emily had desperately wanted her baby to be all right. Not out of duty. A child wasn’t only a responsibility. It was an opportunity to love someone the way that she had never been loved. And for the first time in this whole shameful, humiliating, helpless process, Emily Vaughn knew without a doubt that she loved this baby.”

— Karin Slaughter

191. “How I compare it to now is, at this moment we are all living through, everyone on earth is experiencing a suspension of loss. Over half a million people dead in the United States alone. The number is too overwhelming to accept, so we go on with our lives and we do what we can but, in the end, the staggering loss will be waiting for us. It always catches up to you, doesn’t it?”

— Karin Slaughter

192. “Will thought of her time away from work the way he used to think of his schoolteachers crawling into their caves under the school building at night, lulling themselves to sleep with dreams of torturing their students the next day.”

— Karin Slaughter

193. “She doubted a generation that had grown up with WAP, murder hornets, Covid, cataclysmic social unrest, and being forcibly home-schooled by a bunch of depressed day drinkers really understood the threat of pool halls, but Leigh had to hand it to the drama teacher for putting on a gender-neutral production of The Music Man, one of the least offensive and most tedious musicals ever staged by a middle school.”

— Karin Slaughter

194. “Even on Abigail’s wedding day, Beatrice had told her daughter to be careful, that men were selfish creatures at their core, and there were only a handful of them who managed to overcome that natural inclination.”

— Karin Slaughter

195. “To explain that she knew how marriages worked, understood the petty grievances that could build up. She should tell Charlie that it didn’t matter. That if you loved someone, you should do everything you could to make it work because the person you adored more than anyone else in the world could complain of a sore throat one day and be dead the next.”

— Karin Slaughter

196. “Everybody felt that history was like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s not how it worked. Real life was all middle.”

— Karin Slaughter

197. “When you’re drowning, you don’t stop to teach somebody else how to swim.”

— Karin Slaughter

198. “As if they could understand what she had been through. As if they knew what it was like to be strong and invincible one day and completely powerless the next.”

— Karin Slaughter

199. “They only remembered the good times.”

— Karin Slaughter

200. “Callie would never understand how Bill Gates had been shortsighted enough to give everybody easy access to the internet so that some day, these jackasses could reveal all of his dastardly plans.”

— Karin Slaughter