c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.
— Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have lunch at ten-forty-five,” Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.
— Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me
Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.
— Matilda Joslyn Gage
The argument could be made that the word 'hero' is overused. I do not think, however, that this is the case when referring to teachers.
— Steve Maraboli
I don't know what's worse, being ignored or stared at.
— Renata Suerth, New School & Other Stuff
I was born scientist but my school turned me into just student
— Vijay Dhameliya
Mrs. Hanks taught that everybody’s bodies were exactly the same. She was ignorant and didn't think much about things, but she was teaching her students to be ignorant too. She was teaching them the wrong thing.
— Jesse Haubert, We Found a Horse and Other Stories
Adults always ask kids how they are doing at school. The one subject kids absolutely hate talking about. You don't even want to talk about school when you are at school.
— David Walliams, Gangsta Granny
There's nothing wrong with athletics, but they shouldn't get in the way of your schoolwork.
— Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy
It was Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. he considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar. After the delicious freedom of Saturday and Sunday, it was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the very thought of school: the dismal yellow building; the fire-eyed Vedanayagam, his class teacher, and headmaster with his thin long cane...
— R.K. Narayan, Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher
I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.''That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
— Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
On the board, Mr. Beery had written "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it." I wasn't sure if this was meant to be inspirational, thematic, or a joke about making sure to study.
— Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done
Everything's temporary...until it's not.
— Renata Suerth, New School & Other Stuff
Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition.
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
Joel, lad, school is about learning to learn. If you don't practice studying things you don't like, then you'll have a very hard time in life.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Rithmatist
Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?
— Steven James, Placebo
After getting dressed at warp speed, I actually managed to drive all the way to high school before I realized I'd forgotten my morning coffee. Mystery, intrigue, and naked dreams aside, that didn't bode well for my chances at making it through the morning without killing myself. Or someone else.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Killer Spirit
I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control.
— Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the strength to tell of the name-callers on my own. But at the time, all I knew was that if I avoided eye contact, it was a hell of a lot easier to get through my days.
— Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
Susie: Hi Calvin! Aren't you excited about going to school? Look at all these great school supplies I got! I love having new notebooks and stuff!Calvin:All I've got to say is they're not making me learn any foreign languages. If English is good enough for me, then by golly, it's good enough for the rest of the world! Everyone should just speak English or shut up, that's what I say!Susie: You should maybe check the chemical content of your breakfast cereal.
— Bill Watterson, The Revenge of the Baby-Sat
Reading relaxes me.
— Elizabeth    Newton, Moon Man
Being a successful student is about more than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's about being a skilled negotiator, a keen observer, and a master planner.
— Stefanie Weisman, The Secrets of Top Students: Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Acing High School and College
It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.
— Ellen Gilchrist, Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories
If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.
— John Whitehead
I’m assuming you have a reason behind this irrational need to conform to this institution." (Eric)
— Shannon A. Thompson, Minutes Before Sunset
Only one day at public school and the bitches already made your locker rain?" she laughs. "Impressive.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever.
— Michael Crichton, Prey
I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.
— M.T. Anderson, Feed
Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)
— Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette
[On hearing that 86% of gay teens have experienced harassment] Eighty-six percent? Eighty-six per-fuckin-cent WERE harassed?! That means fourteen per-fuckin-cent WEREN'T harassed? WHAT?!At MY school a hundred percent of the children - gay, straight, transgendered, bi, sell... or trade - WERE harassed. She's saying that fourteen percent of the gay students were NOT harassed? That seems impossible.At MY school any one of us would have sucked Elton John's COCK at a mandatory school assembly for a fourteen percent chance of NOT being harassed.
— Penn Jillette
When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.
— Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school.
— Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me
Teaching middle school is an adventure not a job.
— Angela K. Bennett
Don’t you know that’s what college is about...students spending years gathering useless information they’ll never use again, going hopelessly into debt, just so they feel smarter than the rest of their family? I mean, that’s why I worked so hard to get here, anyway.
— A.L. Jackson, Lost to You
He smiled all the way to physics class. He almost laughed out loud when he passed through the door and saw her shadowy, hunched-over form casting around for a seat in the back.She was in his class; this was excellent. Maybe she’d call him a name if he struck up another conversation. Even curse him out. That might fun. God, he’d probably earn himself a restraining order if he tried to sit next to her.He was so tired of saccharine smiles and cloying tones of voice. People always plastered their eyes to his face for fear of looking anywhere else. He was fed up with everybody being so goddamned nice.That’s why he’d already fallen in love with this weird, maladjusted, beautiful girl who carried a chip the size of Ohio on her shoulder. Because nobody was ever mean to the guy in the wheelchair.
— Francine Pascal, Fearless
The central challenge for educational systems around the world is the substitution of effectiveness for popularity.
— Douglas B. Reeves, Transforming Professional Development Into Student Results
The child, unhampered, does not waste time.
— Caroline Pratt
I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
At school, everything feels weird. No one looks at me or pays attention to me, no one says hi, no one asks how I am feeling, and everyone is so quite. It’s like I don’t even exist.
— Abraham M. Alghanem, Summer and Autumn
I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner - then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows -'The deficiency is there, sir-there; and here,' he added, touching the upper sides of my head, 'here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep.'I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred - hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. ("The Lifted Veil")
— George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
You show me a school with a principal behind the desk, and I'll show you a school without principal leadership. (Quoting Baruti Kafele)
— William Sterrett, Insights Into Action: Successful School Leaders Share What Works
...he would tell stories about the Holy City, about Solomon, a just king, a poet-king, a monarch with a thousand concubines. We weren't quite sure what concubines were, but we guessed: a concubine ... Concubines! One thousand! One thousand women in all colours and shapes - but all of them sexy, of course - one thousand - one thousand raving beauties lying side by side on a bed (what a bed! How wide it must have been!), all of them smiling, all of them reaching out their arms, all of them saying something in Hebrew - but the meaning was unmistakeable - "Come here, sweety." One thousand women. If one were to spend twenty, or fifteen minutes with each one of them, how long would it take to...? A problem that our math teacher never assigned us for homework...!
— Moacyr Scliar
These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.
— Mike Schmoker, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
For in today’s generation of teenagers finding acceptance is hard, especially for those who dare to be different-then it’s impossible.
— Rebecah McManus, Colliding Worlds
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.
— Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it in summer school
— Josh Stern
I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of	meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody in school is stronger than me. But when Sally Holmes kissed me, I never felt so weak in all my life.
— Steven Herrick, Cold Skin
I tell him about ... Jack and Annabel, smart and ready and I'm wondering where all that smart comes from and I figure some from parents, some from school, and some from a place inside you.
— Steven Herrick, A Place Like This
The building is a tumbling house of cards behind me. The bus bitches are paper cutouts.
— Jolene Stockman, The Jelly Bean Crisis
For in the forest someone is always watching and someone is always listening!
— Nancy B. Brewer
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
— William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2
When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.
— Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
But what if the monsters come?""Fancy." Kit looked away from the drama to stare at her sister, surprised. "We are the monsters.
— Dia Reeves, Slice of Cherry
If you're that obsessed with someone, why would you kill her?Humans are full of contradictions.
— Ai Yazawa
Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
— Alfred Hitchcock
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
— Johnny Cash, The Very Best of Johnny Cash
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
He'd kill you all right. No sweat. But for the wrong reasons. Amateur's reasons. Of course, you'll be just as dead.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Is there a reason you look like you want to murder me?""Not particularly. You have that effect on people.
— Martina Boone, Compulsion
Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?
— Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?""Every one of them," Yossarian told him."Every one of whom?""Every one of whom do you think?""I haven't any idea.""Then how do you know they aren't?""Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. 	Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
— Sigmund Freud
Why does anyone commit murder?' he asked in a low voice.'I-'I blinked.'How should I know?''Three reasons,' Christopher said. He held up one finger. 'Love.' Another finger. 'Revenge.' And finally, a third finger. 'Profit...
— Meg Cabot, Runaway
I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae’s long fingers closed over my wrist. “What? You can’t eat this raw?”“It’s bitter melon. You won’t like it.” He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. “Here, leftover bao. There’s char siu inside.”“The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese.” “It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti.
— Rhys Ford, Dirty Kiss
I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
That's blackmail on top of attempted murder, Kye. I can officially kill you
— Keri Arthur, Bound to Shadows
It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people? It costs everything you are.
— Suzanne Collins
She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.
— Émile Zola
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
Who are you and why are you here?''I'm here to kill you.''Oh. I knew there was something about you I liked.
— Greg Farshtey
God made them as stubble to our swords.
— Oliver Cromwell
Don't make me kill you at this hour in the morning Jimmy. It's not civilized.
— Kylie Scott, Lead
What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one's house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean.
— Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library
I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it.
— Carl Panzram
Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
You should have died when I killed you.
— John le Carré
The Nazis are not justified by s
— Joseph  Bayly
I am not a one-issue voter in the sense that indicates I am an ignorant fundamentalist who only cares about one thing. I believe in protecting the environment. I believe in caring for the poor, the orphan, the widow in her distress. These are some of the so-called "issues" that many of us use to justify voting for Obama. How can we possibly claim it is Christian love for the poor and helpless that motivates us to vote for such a man when he is so committed to the killing of the most helpless among us?
— Joseph  Bayly
This is going to be murder," Fransic whispered to Mr. Trimes. "Pure murder.""I'm glad to see your confidence returning, Mr. Tucket. Just a few minutes ago you were ready to give up. Now you're talking about killing him.""I meant it the other way.""Oh.
— Gary Paulsen, Mr. Tucket
A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.
— Lynda Barry, Cruddy
It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.
— Moshe Dayan
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something many of his colleagues never figured out. Murder was deeply human, the murdered and the murderer. To describe the murderer as a monstrosity, a grotesque, was to give him an unfair advantage. No. Murderers were human, and at the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped, no doubt. Twisted and ugly. But an emotion. And one so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost.Gamache's job was to collect the evidence, but also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was do get to know the people. To watch and listen. To pay attention, and the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual way in a deceptively casual setting.Like the bistro.
— Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace
It's kind of like... It's kind of like playin' a basketball game. I am there and the other player is there, and it's just the two of us and I put the other player's body in my van. And I am the winner.
— Chris Onstad
Twenty to life, she got, with time off for good behavior. You come around next spring. I'll introduce you.
— Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Go Bump in the Night
But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
— Albert Camus
It's like pretending to be Santa and then stabbing someone with a candy cane!
— Ellery Adams, Chili Con Corpses
Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!
— Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground
In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That's the spirit of Christmas yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho.
— Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.
— Jennifer Birkett
I’m sure the ‘I wouldn’t fuck a murder conspirator’ argument wins over many an internal affairs review board. Bring him in. It’ll be in your favor.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
— P.D. James, The Murder Room
Something of a pattern had started to form and it was ugly.
— Jeff Rice, The Night Stalker
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
— P.D. James, The Murder Room
How Many Lumberjacks Does it Take to Ravish, Maim and Kill Five Feisty Female Co-eds?Read 'Lumberjacked' by Rich Bottles Jr. to find out!Lumberjacked: A Supernatural Tale of Murder and Mayhem in the Mountain State.
— Rich Bottles Jr., Lumberjacked
He scraped through the dark sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, proptected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage. Then he fled, but his flight was slow as the flight in a dream, impeded by the deep sand and the blurring hands of the fog. He fled from the goodness of that home, and his hatred for Laurel throttled his brain. If she had come back to him, he would not be shut out, an outcast in a strange, cold world. 
— Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
[First line]“The business of murder took time, patience, skill, and a tolerance for the monotonous.
— J.D. Robb, Vengeance in Death
I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em.
— Carl Panzram, Panzram: A Journal of Murder
I like a good murder that can't be found out. That is, of course it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.
— Emily Eden, The Semi-Detached House
I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.
— Hope Barrett, Discovering Oscar
In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.
— Jennifer Birkett
The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.
— Theodore Dalrymple, So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer
There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought
— Honoré de Balzac
It is wrong to kill anyone. It is wrong to kill those who kill. It is wrong to kill the executioner. The laws on murder must be killed!
— Charles Nodier
I, Larry Vail, do hereby confessTo murdering Merry in her little dress.To strangling and raping and making a mess.To all of these charges the answer is yes.
— Rosalyn Drexler, The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays
Murderers don't even know that murder happens.
— David Rabe, Sticks and Bones
Now get the fuck up off the ground so I can put you in it... like a coffin. Because you'll be fucking dead after I kill you, you fucking asshole.
— Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 27: The Whisperer War
And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Killing is killing, whether done for duty, profit or fun
— Richard Ramirez
I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
Rules meant order. Without them they’d be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.
— Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder
[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.
— Max Barry, Lexicon
The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivablybe right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.
— G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.
— Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Take a seat, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll kill you in a few minutes. It’ll be good for you.
— Frederick Weisel, Teller
When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.
— V.S. Carnes
And yet I shall try again: "they are murdering me!"--all right, all together once more: "they are murdering me!" and again: "murdering"... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
no one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays
The real core of this book is about the open secrets that can fester in a community until an outsider raises questions.
— J. Alexander Greenwood, Pilate's Cross
Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please."Anthony Perkin's Norman BatesTalking To Janet Leigh's Marion Crane.
— Alfred Hitchcock
Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
— P.D. James, The Lighthouse
Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence.
— P.D. James, The Murder Room
There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again.
— Caris O'Malley
Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.
— Adam Rapp, Nocturne: A Play
Our sainted aunts prate of living for others while our rich uncles call us mollycoddles for not fighting for what we want. Murder is a patriotic act if you commit it in a uniform
—  it is the blackest sin if you kill someone while wearing a gray flannel suit.
And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments and apparitions? Their visionary art (who, more than they, evoked a truer image of life?) was closely related to that of magicians: bewitchments were carried out with wax figures, witch trials are full of them, and one particular legend haunted me above all, that of the modeler from Anspach, who slowly squeezed the soul and the life out of his model in order to animate his painted waxwork and then, having finished his work of art, awaited nightfall to go and bury the corpse in the ditch at the city walls.
— Jean Lorrain
You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. 
— Edgar Allan Poe
Asparagus is in season.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
March 28, 1987:	Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges.	Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever.	I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can nerf escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pig lady who can’t see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits.	An eye for an eye …		I’m not afraid of anything I’d ever done.	Not ashamed of anything.
— Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals
We had, like I said before. . .we had to prevent life. We had to kill. It’s as simple as that.” —STEVE MASSOF
— Ann McElhinney, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer
What will your family think, me showing up on their doorstep with my suitcase in hand?""I'll carry your suitcase," he said.
— B.J. Daniels, Rough Rider
Death kept waiting for its second course on the kitchen floor
—  but Amila’s morals struggled to prepare its main meal.
Five minutes ago is gone, never to be seen again. Five minutes from now, isn't here yet....What are you going to do with it?
— T. L. Henry, Key West or Bust: "A Modern Day Bonni and Klide"
It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable?
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,00 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
— Martha Wells, All Systems Red
No one gets away with committting murder on the premises.""No exceptions?" she asked.His smile was as cold as his eyes. "One exception.""You," she said."Me."She took a short, tight breath."But you didn't kill Gloria Maitland," she said."What makes you so sure I didn't murder her?""You're a magician. You would have done a better job of it.
— Amanda Quick, The Girl Who Knew Too Much
Killing one person was murder; killing a few or dozens was ore murder; so killing thousands or tens of thousands ought to be punished by putting the murderer to death a thousand times. What about more than that? a few hundred thousand? The death penalty, right? Yet, those of you who know some history are starting to hesitate. What if he killed millions? I can guarantee you such a person would not be considered a murderer. Indeed, such a person may not even be thought to have broken any law. If you don't believe me, just study history! Anyone who has killed millions is deemed a 'great' man, a hero.And if that person destroyed a whole world and killed every life on it--he would be hailed as a savior!
— Liu Cixin, Death's End
Why was the taking of a life considered so terrible? In no time at all there would be all new people on this planet, and everyone who was in the planet now would have died, some terribly, some like the flick of a switch. The real reason that murder was considered so transgressive was because of the people that were left behind . The loved ones. But what if someone was not really loved?
— Peter Swanson
You are not a murderer. I find it difficult to think of that as a personality flaw.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I’m obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don’t say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father.
— Alejandro Zambra, Multiple Choice
Today he became a killer, or else a corpse.
— Eoin Colfer, Airman
Plan all you want, it is a very different thing to actually kill a person than to fantasize about it. In your fantasy, you have superhuman strength. Or your action takes no strength at all. You just do it, your arms gliding effortlessly through the weightlessness of your dream world. In reality, you have to plunge a knife or pull a trigger. You have to look into the eyes of an actual person. You see their humanity. You have to push past the respect for life that has been drilled into you since before you could talk. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It happens every day. But for normal people who have lived their whole lives as law-abiding citizens, trying to be polite and well-mannered, respectful of their elders and kind to animals, good listeners and good employees; for people who use their turn signals, and hurry to get to work on. time, leave tips for their letter carrier, and put dollars in the Salvation Army’s red bucket, hoping to make the world a little better— killing another human being is not an easy thing.
— Allison Leotta, A Good Killing
The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.
— Sue Grafton, I is for Innocent
I know that the Kaiser incarnates all there is of brute force and of murder. And yet I would not, if I had the power, kill the Kaiser. I would do to him what Thomas Paine wanted to do to the king of England. He said, "Destroy the king, but save the man.
— Eugene V. Debs
Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Extinguish even the wee annoyance, as it will grow to become evil!
— Michael Bussa
If anyone was going to get themselves murdered to guarantee they would remain the center of attention, it would be him.
— Seanan McGuire, Once Broken Faith
I am a practitioner of the science of deduction, of using the known facts in a case to unveil the unknown.’ - Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Murders
— Mark Sohn, Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Murders: An Account of the Matter by John Watson M.D.
Planning a murder takes a lot of prep work.
— Brahms Lewis
Human beings were so full of emotion. That was the problem. They could kill for a reason that to them felt like the only reason and to the rest of the rational thinking population felt like no reason at all.
— Paula Daly, The Trophy Child