Top 160 Patricia Cornwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “People fail, everything fails, the magic we’re born believing in and working for and then doubting and finally fearing eventually rusts, rots, fades, breaks down, withers, dies, and turns to dust, and for me the response is always the same. I clean up. It’s what I do and.”

— Patricia Cornwell

52. “Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm.”

— Patricia Cornwell

53. “Murder is about power and the more powerful women get the more it will change the good that they do and the bad that they do.”

— Patricia Cornwell

54. “At some level we intend everything we do. That’s why it’s extremely important to root out our intentions before they uproot us.”

— Patricia Cornwell

55. “He has Raynaud’s syndrome.”

— Patricia Cornwell

56. “Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn’t it?”

— Patricia Cornwell

57. “With DNA, the ability to find out a lot more with a lot less has increased our ability for identification.”

— Patricia Cornwell

58. “The biggest risk with a series that goes on this long is that you’ll get bored with the character.”

— Patricia Cornwell

59. “As is true with everything else, whatever can be used for good most assuredly will be used for evil.”

— Patricia Cornwell

60. “A haze had dulled the sky, and a plane was a silver needle pulling a white thread beneath the sun.”

— Patricia Cornwell

61. “Being gay is just one aspect of my very complicated life. I do not wear it on my sleeve.”

— Patricia Cornwell

62. “It’s fascinating to ponder the name Jack the Ripper. Who thought of it? I’m quite certain he did. The Ripper’s communications indicate he dubbed himself that and many other variations of it. He called himself all sorts of things, whatever pleased and amused him at the moment. Sickert was accustomed to having stage names. As a child he was acting in his homespun Shakespeare plays, and when he reached his teens he chose the theater as a career.”

— Patricia Cornwell

63. “America is the most violent democracy in the world. It’s something that’s met with great shock, horror, and mystery when I travel to other countries. They ask, Why are there so many shootings in America? Why does everyone own a gun?”

— Patricia Cornwell

64. “Meaning they can maintain a core temperature independently of the environmental temperature,” I reply. “That’s rather remarkable, and not what I’d expect.” “Like the dinosaurs, they can survive in waters as warm as the tropics or cold enough to kill a human in minutes.” “Certainly defies what I understand about reptiles.” I.”

— Patricia Cornwell

65. “I’ve always believed human blood is red because it really needs to draw attention to itself.”

— Patricia Cornwell

66. “I intended to beat down any lingering resistance with bluntness.”

— Patricia Cornwell

67. “In my forties, my optimism was boundless. I had really good health and tremendous success which allowed me to do anything I wanted.”

— Patricia Cornwell

68. “Even if you are a best-seller you feel insecure because it is all so unpredictable.”

— Patricia Cornwell

69. “Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son’s attention to a memorial. “There’s a name you will never remember,” Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read:.”

— Patricia Cornwell

70. “Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful.”

— Patricia Cornwell

71. “I refuse to sit on my laurels.”

— Patricia Cornwell

72. “Anger helps nothing. What’s done is done. Now we move on.”

— Patricia Cornwell

73. “Somewhere deep within the emptiness of her eyes was a glint of grief, of rage.”

— Patricia Cornwell

74. “Let’s be honest, the world’s always been a scary place with very little charm.” I try to brush it off as I’ve brushed off the flu, as I brushed off the death of my father when I was young, as I’ve brushed off so much since Benton has known me.”

— Patricia Cornwell

75. “Leaves covered pavement like soggy cereal.”

— Patricia Cornwell

76. “Little things are important. Eating, sleeping, being clean, exercise. Regaining control.”

— Patricia Cornwell

77. “Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will.”

— Patricia Cornwell

78. “Disrespect is a symptom of weakness, of smallness, of an existential problem. By acting rude to me he’s showing me what he really thinks of himself.”

— Patricia Cornwell

79. “Charisma is something you have or you don’t have. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t. She didn’t try. It just was. – Matt Pettersen.”

— Patricia Cornwell

80. “The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can’t create, we’ll destroy, and once we’ve done it, once is not enough.”

— Patricia Cornwell

81. “I was consumed, too, not by the dying but by the dead.”

— Patricia Cornwell

82. “People can burn and beat love out of you. They really can kill it, and it’s not your fault you don’t feel it anymore, and how liberating it is to finally realize that. Love isn’t for better or for worse, through thick or thin. It damn well shouldn’t be.”

— Patricia Cornwell

83. “Succedono cose terribili.”

— Patricia Cornwell

84. “I wouldn’t want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely.”

— Patricia Cornwell

85. “Gravity will get you. Life is inclined toward falling. Not standing or flying, indeed, barely sitting.”

— Patricia Cornwell

86. “He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate.”

— Patricia Cornwell

87. “This day could be our last and if it’s in the cards then so be it. I’ll prevent any bad thing I can. That’s my life’s mission. I also know how to accept finality, to give myself up to what I can’t begin to change. I don’t want to die. But I refuse to fear it. I wait for it without dread because there’s no logic in living a tragedy before it’s happened.”

— Patricia Cornwell

88. “Wit is the genius to perceive and the metaphor to express.’ Or.”

— Patricia Cornwell

89. “You’re only as good as the people around you.”

— Patricia Cornwell

90. “Absolute power has corrupted and the absence of checks and balances seems complete.”

— Patricia Cornwell

91. “And let me tell you another thing,” Marino threw back at.”

— Patricia Cornwell

92. “When I was in second grade, my mother moved from Miami to this evangelical conservative environment in western North Carolina, two miles down the road from Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth.”

— Patricia Cornwell

93. “I wouldn’t want to donate my body for scientific study.”

— Patricia Cornwell

94. “Perhaps my greatest shame was that I could not show what I should, and I worried no one would ever know how much I cared. Crows.”

— Patricia Cornwell

95. “Work and play with them but never show your underbelly, he would say. And for God’s sake keep your knickers on, Kay, or you’ll find out the hard way it’s a man’s world.”

— Patricia Cornwell

96. “People often say they don’t dream, when it’s more accurate to say that they don’t remember their dreams. It gets under our skin, Kay. All of it does. We just manage to cage in most of the emotions so they don’t devour us.”

— Patricia Cornwell

97. “Most of what went wrong in the Ripper investigation was due to ignorance.”

— Patricia Cornwell

98. “Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. It wasn’t uncommon for forensic pathologists from the British Commonwealth to spend a month at my office to learn more about gunshot wounds. It wasn’t uncommon for career cops like Pete Marino to leave the madness of New York or Chicago only to find Richmond was worse.”

— Patricia Cornwell

99. “I dropped chemistry. I practically blew up the lab in college.”

— Patricia Cornwell

100. “You can master your weather. You can make it what you want. You can have storms or sunshine. You can duck and hide or walk out in the open.”

— Patricia Cornwell