Top 160 Patricia Cornwell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Survival my only hope. Success my only revenge.”

— Patricia Cornwell

2. “I didn’t invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.”

— Patricia Cornwell

3. “I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.”

— Patricia Cornwell

4. “Like most things in life, it’s all about timing.”

— Patricia Cornwell

5. “Vulgarity is inversely proportionate to intelligence and facility with languages. Profuse swearing is generally associated with a low IQ, a limited vocabulary and uncontrollable hostility.”

— Patricia Cornwell

6. “The dead have never bothered me. It’s the living that I fear.”

— Patricia Cornwell

7. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land, 1922.”

— Patricia Cornwell

8. “Botox not only helps with wrinkles, it actually makes you feel more relaxed as frowning causes tension.”

— Patricia Cornwell

9. “Gordian knot, a knot impossible to unravel, and Alexander the Great solved the problem by cutting through it with his sword, in other words by cheating.”

— Patricia Cornwell

10. “Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upsets.”

— Patricia Cornwell

11. “I constantly remind people that crime isn’t solved by technology; it’s solved by people.”

— Patricia Cornwell

12. “First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.”

— Patricia Cornwell

13. “I don’t do things that are illegal.”

— Patricia Cornwell

14. “Everyone is doing forensics.”

— Patricia Cornwell

15. “You have to live where you wake up, even if someone else dreamed you there.”

— Patricia Cornwell

16. “My friends call me Miss Worst Case Scenario.”

— Patricia Cornwell

17. “For that matter I didn’t understand Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn’t follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.”

— Patricia Cornwell

18. “When you dine with the devil use a long spoon, and I’ve repeatedly preached that to him, too.”

— Patricia Cornwell

19. “Eddie Heath had come in naked with IV needles, catheter, and dressings still in place. They.”

— Patricia Cornwell

20. “We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple...”

— Patricia Cornwell

21. “Digital communication has begun to make me feel I’m moving faster than ever even as I lose the trusted navigational equipment I was born with. My own eyes. My own ears. My own sense of touch. I miss paper and pen. I miss face-to-face conversations. I worry we’re on a collision course with doubt and delusion on a galactic scale.”

— Patricia Cornwell

22. “To almost die is to know that one day you will, and to never again feel the same about anything.”

— Patricia Cornwell

23. “On the last morning of Virginia’s bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.”

— Patricia Cornwell

24. “I tended to hold love hostage in my heart because, if expressed, I feared it might abandon me as many people in my life had.”

— Patricia Cornwell

25. “I like crazy shoes or unusual cowboy boots and I collect big belt buckles.”

— Patricia Cornwell

26. “Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air.”

— Patricia Cornwell

27. “Io non volevo vivere la mia vita con la paura del male.”

— Patricia Cornwell

28. “And suddenly the world was filled with wooden faces and flat voices – and, you were alone.”

— Patricia Cornwell

29. “Thoughts are odd misfires.”

— Patricia Cornwell

30. “It was raining in Richmond on Friday, June 6.”

— Patricia Cornwell

31. “If everybody, every day, would try to do one thing that pulls them beyond themselves the world will start being a better place.”

— Patricia Cornwell

32. “The world is full of people who mean no harm and cause a great deal of it.”

— Patricia Cornwell

33. “Because the most treacherous enemy is the one you think you know and understand. The one you trust and love. The one whose darkness threatens your very light, the heart and soul of your very power, and you’re none the wiser. Your subjectivity, your bias has rendered you blind, deaf, and dumb. You see what you want to see instead of what’s there.”

— Patricia Cornwell

34. “Even when I am writing I usually take a break around lunchtime and go for a little walk to clear out my head.”

— Patricia Cornwell

35. “Being with someone who is smart and gives good advice adds tremendously wonderful elements to your life.”

— Patricia Cornwell

36. “Predators watch their quarry. It starts with the eyes.”

— Patricia Cornwell

37. “Succinctly put, a crime scene is like an archaeology site. If an excavation is botched or bulldozed away, there’s no going back.”

— Patricia Cornwell

38. “It’s not true that we are never given more than we can bear. Only it isn’t given. It simply happens.”

— Patricia Cornwell

39. “That’s one of the perks if you’re sick. You already feel bad enough and then people make you feel worse because they don’t want to bother you.”

— Patricia Cornwell

40. “Your aura has nothing to do with colors or foods you like.” She smiled. “Yellow can mean spiritual. And brown I associate with good sense, practical. Someone grounded in reality. I see your aura as being very spiritual but also very practical. Now mind you, that is my interpretation. For each person, colors mean a different thing.”

— Patricia Cornwell

41. “When what we believe we’ve mastered is no longer predictable we’re not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm.”

— Patricia Cornwell

42. “I didn’t want her to be like me, robbed of innocence and idealism, baptized in the bloody waters of randomness and cruelty, the fabric of trust forever torn.”

— Patricia Cornwell

43. “Technology made everything better for a while and now it seems life is circling back around to the dark ages.”

— Patricia Cornwell

44. “That’s the beauty of Washington,” she replied cynically. “The most successful, powerful people in the world are there and half of them are crazy, the other half neurotic. Most of them are immoral. Power does it. I don’t know why Watergate surprised anyone.”

— Patricia Cornwell

45. “Hate makes you stupid.”

— Patricia Cornwell

46. “People don’t really know what anything is really like until it really happens to them.”

— Patricia Cornwell

47. “Phantosmia. I’m not sure it’s real.” “It is. Molecules of putrefaction become volatilized like pollution attaching to water molecules in the air and creating smog.” “So I have the smog of death in my sinuses.” “More or less.” “Christ I hope I don’t stink.” I lean close to him, and diamond-stitched black leather smells.”

— Patricia Cornwell

48. “I’m always surprised when large numbers of people buy my books.”

— Patricia Cornwell

49. “I’m very, very sensitive to pain and to people who suffer.”

— Patricia Cornwell

50. “I feel something change in me... I feel a flat calm, a detachment, the way I get when something is too much and yet l must function and in fact function at the highest level. I know what I’m in for, only a fool wouldn’t know that...”

— Patricia Cornwell