Top 35 Michelle McNamara Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy.”

— Michelle McNamara

2. “Looking back now, it feels like I was born into a party that had started to wind down.”

— Michelle McNamara

3. “I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.”

— Michelle McNamara

4. “I lamented to one of them that I felt I was grasping at straws. “My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.”

— Michelle McNamara

5. “He pointed a knife at her and issued a chilling warning: “Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.”

— Michelle McNamara

6. “I love my husband. I hate men.”

— Michelle McNamara

7. “My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.”

— Michelle McNamara

8. “Why are you so interested in crime?” people ask me, and I always go back to that moment in the alley, the shards of a dead girl’s Walkman in my hands. I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face.”

— Michelle McNamara

9. “Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.”

— Michelle McNamara

10. “A forensic match between the cases didn’t exist but a feeling did, a sense that a single mind was at work, someone who didn’t leave many clues or talk or show his face, someone who strolled undetected in the middle-class swarm, an ordinary man with a resting-pulse derangement.”

— Michelle McNamara

11. “Inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery.”

— Michelle McNamara

12. “Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.”

— Michelle McNamara

13. “He loses his power when we know his face.”

— Michelle McNamara

14. “That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep. I’ll look out for you.”

— Michelle McNamara

15. “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.”

— Michelle McNamara

16. “In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.”

— Michelle McNamara

17. “Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.”

— Michelle McNamara

18. “Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.”

— Michelle McNamara

19. “What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave?”

— Michelle McNamara

20. “Every obsession needs a room of its own.”

— Michelle McNamara

21. “Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.”

— Michelle McNamara

22. “Most violent criminals are impulsive, disorganized, and easily caught. The vast majority of homicides are committed by people known to the victim and, despite game attempts to throw off the police, these offenders are usually identified and arrested. It’s a tiny minority of criminals, maybe 5 percent, who present the biggest challenge – the ones whose crimes reveal preplanning and unremorseful rage.”

— Michelle McNamara

23. “Shelby’s one of those proudly blunt people whose eyes flick away the moment before they say something hard, a giveaway to softness churning underneath.”

— Michelle McNamara

24. “I always find it something of a relief to be in the presence of someone who knows the shorthand.”

— Michelle McNamara

25. “Your imagination compensated for failed reality.”

— Michelle McNamara

26. “Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.”

— Michelle McNamara

27. “I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.”

— Michelle McNamara

28. “When you sit there showing no emotion, kind of agreeing with them, almost like you’re enjoying what they’re telling you, they’ll talk.”

— Michelle McNamara

29. “What I always think about, I told him, are experiments that show that animals in captivity would rather have to search for their food than have it given to them. Seeking is the lever that tips our dopamine gush.”

— Michelle McNamara

30. “What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave? Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their hold.”

— Michelle McNamara

31. “US crime rates show a steady rise in violent crime throughout the 1960s and ’70s, peaking in 1980. Taxi Driver came out in February 1976; the bleak and violent film was hailed as an encapsulation of its time, to no one’s surprise. Many retired cops I talk to, from Sacramento but other places too, uniformly recall 1968 to 1980 as a particularly grim period.”

— Michelle McNamara

32. “I’ve now come to realize that getting excited about a suspect is a lot like that first surge of stupid love in a relationship, in which, despite vague alarm bells, you plow forward convinced that he is the One.”

— Michelle McNamara

33. “Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their hold.”

— Michelle McNamara

34. “Irvine’s motto, goes the joke, is “sixteen zip codes, six floor plans.” Or “Irvine: we have sixty-two words for beige.”

— Michelle McNamara

35. “He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.”

— Michelle McNamara

36. “The victims recede from view. Their rhythm is off, their confidence drained. They’re laden with phobias and made tentative by memory. Divorce and drugs beset them. Statutes of limitations expire. Evidence kits are tossed for lack of room. What happened to them is buried, bright and unmoving, a coin at the bottom of a pool. They do their best to carry on.”

— Michelle McNamara

37. “She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions.”

— Michelle McNamara

38. “It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength?”

— Michelle McNamara

39. “You excelled at the stealth sidle. But your heydey prowess has no value anymore. Your skill set has been phased out. The tables have been turned. Virtual windows are opening all around you. You, the master watcher, are an aging, lumbering target in their crosshairs. A ski mask won’t help you now.”

— Michelle McNamara