Patricia Cornwell Quotes (14 Quotes)

Putnam has done a wonderful job for me. Why would I want to be published anywhere else

This is a crime scene and you are doing an autopsy on that submarine. It's much like Jack the Ripper -- you take the best modern science and apply it to a very old investigation and see if you can make the dead speak after all these years.

Because if somebody literally proves me wrong not only will I feel horrible about it, but I will look terrible.

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.

Both were cremated so fast. To this day, it really bothers me. One minute they were there the next minute they weren't. It's like a door that isn't quite closed.

If it turns out that something indisputably proved that this notorious killer was someone other than Walter Richard Sickert, I would be the first to offer congratulations and retract my accusations.

Unique First fit her name like a glove, or at least this was how her mother always put it. Unique came first and was one of a kind. There was no one else like her--and this was a damn good thing, to quote her father, Dr. Ulysses First, who had never understood what genetic malignancy blighted his only child.

The Ripper case is not one to be conclusively solved by DNA or fingerprints, ... and in a way, this is good. Society has come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve all crimes, but without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidence means nothing.

Benton Wesley was taking off his running shoes in my kitchen when I ran to him, my heart tripping over fear and hate and remembered horror.

My ongoing investigation is far from an obsession, but an excellent opportunity to provide a platform for applying modern science to a very old, highly visible case in the hope that we might learn something that could help solve modern crimes.

We have a really serious problem on our hands, and TV has made it so much worse. CSI is fun to watch and entertaining. But, more and more, jury members believe that police and scientists work every case with this huge bag of tricks, and if they don't, the victim and jurors feel the case has not been adequately investigated.

I know from Lucy's voice that she is scared. Rarely is my brilliant, forceful, helicopter-piloting, fitness-obsessed, federal-law-enforcement-agent niece scared.

That morning, summer sulked and gathered darkly over Charlotte, and heat shimmered on pavement. Traffic teemed, people pushing forward to promise as they drove through new construction, and the past was bulldozed away.

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