Lizzie Borden Quotes

the books I read were the dark kind—about scary things like disappearances and murders, especially the true ones. While other kids read J. K. Rowling, I read Stephen King. While other kids did history reports about the Civil War, I read about Lizzie Borden.

My mothering needed a tad more Mother Theresa and a lot less Lizzy Borden.

Chief Fox maintained a neutral expression, but I knew he had to be wondering exactly how insane Ted was on a scale of one to Lizzie Borden.

It's strange, the importance we assign to handling things our loved ones have touched, or to revisiting historic scenes, of epic battles or first dates. To sleeping in Lizzie Borden's bedroom. These are attempts at folding time, at pinning one piece of fabric to another. But time doesn't work that way, you know. That's why you feel so empty afterward.

Consider me your rescuer, not your jailer," he said to Frankie, without looking at her. His gut told him that, on the criminal mastermind scale, this one landed closer to Tinker Bell than Lizzie Borden.

Ms. Borden is Lizzy’s mother?

Jackson," he mused. "Not a name either one of you was born to." Lizzie answered, "No. But beyond a certain point, names become accessories. We swap them out as needed, for the sake of peace. You understand?" "I understand. Though I disagree. Names aren't hats to change a look, or a suit to be swapped at a whim. Words mean things." "Then we must agree to disagree.

She wielded it easily, lightly. She carried it swinging like a baseball bat, only with more poetry to it. It was a frightening thing to watch, this small shadow of billowing grey fabric and sprawling, wild hair splaying out behind her, the axe held at the ready with both hands, poised and prepared.

It was not a Zodiac attack until the Zodiac said it was a Zodiac attack.

those accused of following the Lizzie Borden model for the settlement of family disputes.

Was the demented little ghouly-girl hanging out with a headless Hessian in Sleepy Hollow now? Taking notes from the blood-bathing Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary? Swinging an ax around like Lizzie Borden? Or

If people would only do me justice that is all I ask, but it seems as if every word I have uttered has been distorted and such a false construction placed on it that I am bewildered. I can't understand it. —Lizzie Borden

As for the prayers, I suppose they can’t hurt. I’ve never found much good in them, I’ll confess that here, though I keep such thoughts private when in public company. Who would confide in a physician who claimed no affiliation with God? I still must feed myself, and keep my house. I still need my patients. But too many people believe with too much conviction in what amounts to, at best, a superstition. I’ve seen science change a patient’s diagnosis, but I’ve never heard a prayer that changed God’s mind about a damn thing..

She collected herself, and rose from the floor. “Until you have a better grasp on what we’re dealing with here, I’d appreciate your immediate proximity.” I did as she asked. She was the expert, after all. But what a terrifying thought, that the world’s foremost expert knew only enough to live in horror.

Except that once I graduated from reading The Black Stallion, the books I read were the dark kind—about scary things like disappearances and murders, especially the true ones. While other kids read J. K. Rowling, I read Stephen King. While other kids did history reports about the Civil War, I read about Lizzie Borden.

To see the world in a way that is different than the way everyone else sees it is pure genius. It is also insanity." Mark Hewitt

an aged man and an aged woman are suddenly and brutally assassinated. It was a terrible crime. It was an impossible crime. But it was committed.

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours -- ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger. You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed.

We wasted little time wondering how anyone, even Lizzie, could nurse for five years a smoldering, mounting, murderous hate for anyone as uninteresting as Abby Borden ... we did, however, attach grave importance to Lizzie's 'peculiar spells.

At the end of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the Prince of Darkness is forced to promise that he will never again show his face in the state of New Hampshire. It is nowhere recorded that any such promise was made about Massachusetts. The Bay State’s history is rife with documented cases of devil worship, witchcraft, and black magic. The state that is known for producing presidents and scholars is also known for Lizzie Borden, who “took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks/Then when she was good and done/Gave her father forty-one,” and for being the home of Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler.

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I’ve tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I review my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.

The notion that a crime could be clearly gendered was rooted in European models of criminology, but such models of criminality struggled to account for a female criminal. Within the prevailing models of the human mind, women were seen as somewhat less evolved than men and with a corresponding lack of rational control over their actions—barely protected from their underlying degeneracy by male control, especially over their sexuality.

I ate and drank what I wanted in Paris. Butter, duck fat, liver fat, triple-cream brie, deep cherry-red wines, pear, clementine and lavender jelly, crème cakes, caviar, escargot in sautéed pine nuts and garlic butter. I did what the French did, I licked my fingers, didn't care if people saw, what they thought. Father would've hated it, would've told me I was uncouth. I ate everything up, ate his money, was delightful everywhere I went. I learned how to wrap my tongue around accented vowels, spoke to this stranger and that. Nobody knew me, didn't expect anything from me. I wanted to stay like that forever.

On the other hand, like most of Fall River, I had always wanted to read Edwin H. Porter's The Fall River Tragedy.  However, Lizzie bought off the printer, a local, and had the books destroyed before they hit the shops

Popular Fall River opinion attributed the murder of Abby Borden to the circumstance that "poor Lizzie was always sort of crazy.

we know lizzy borden did it because of the note

The more I have studied the evidence, the more I realize that this proposed transfer was the precipitating motive for the crime.

That there was a plan, and one that Uncle John was terrified would be discovered and misunderstood, he himself will give us repeated evidence.  But what was the plan?

August 4, 1892, was hot even at dawn; it became the hottest day in memory for all who lived in a town remarkable for its summer heat.  "The hill," that steep slope to the northeast, cuts Fall River off from New England's cool wind from the open sea.

Mrs. Borden walked off toward the front of the house, flicking her feather duster.  Bridget did not see her alive again.

At this point, while the girls chatted on over the fence in the rear side lot, people began to notice things.  A buggy with two men in it made a U-turn and stopped in front of the Kelly cottage.

William Westcott: “American. Farmer. Independent in Politics. Comes to Congregational church. Not interested in religion. Married and second wife. Has not talked about the case.

When Lizzie Borden was acquitted of her parents’ murder in 1893, the people of New England were outraged — but Lizzie didn’t taunt the public for failing to convict her. She just moved into a nice house with her sister and became a recluse. A century later, Borden is “hated” by no one; anyone captivated by her life is predisposed to think about the murders from her perspective (and to hunt for any clue that might validate her improbable innocence). Over time, the public will grow to accept almost any terrible act committed by a celebrity; everything eventually becomes interesting to those who aren’t personally involved. But Simpson does not allow for uninvolvement. He exceeds the acceptable level of self-directed notoriety and changes the polarity of the event; by writing this book, he makes it seem like the worst part of Brown and Goldman’s murder was what happened to him, and that he perversely wants the world to remember that he killed them (even if he’s somehow internally convinced himself that he did not, which is what I always assumed during the trial). He keeps reminding people that he is famous because two other people are dead.

Yes, I'm familiar with the bookcases in your bedroom. I don't remember seeing any pornography." Feather just stares for a moment. "That's because I don't read pornography...unless Twilight counts." "Which it does. In the sense that it appeals to—" "I get it. Do you think that Pattinson guy is cute?" Jessica stares. "What?" "Twilight you've seen? But not Ginger Snaps. You are such an idiot. And the answer is no. But Kristin Stewart is pretty hot in a movie about Lizzie Borden that I know you've never seen if you missed Ginger.

I needed a drink. No, I needed a book. A murder-thriller. Hannibal. Lizzie Borden—anything would do. Maybe I needed both. No, definitely both.

Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks, And when she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.

Oh Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father." - Lizzie Borden, August 4, 1892

I am presently most displeased with the entire male gender and sure it would take little inducement on your part to cause me to use this weapon to lop off your head this night. So be gone with you, for I don’t care to be in your company! You cause me great suspicion!” “I cause you suspicion? You’re the one doin’ the whole Lizzie Borden routine!

I felt there must be substance below the stuffed-shirt exterior. After all, he was a Lizzie Borden expert…

In every detail it shows the stubborn and dogged brutality of the insane.

Knowlton then turned to the defense’s trump card: Where was the blood? As he put it, “How could she have avoided the spattering of her dress with blood if she was the author of these crimes?” Acknowledging this weakness, he suggested that she might have taken advantage of the “solitude of the house with ample fire on the stove.” Perhaps Lizzie used a roll of paper to protect her dress or, more likely, she hid the bloodstained dress until she burned it in the kitchen the next Sunday. But he admitted: “I cannot answer it. You cannot answer it . . . You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex.

The suspected witch was in the dock, the fagots had been piled all around her . . . and the hard-headed District Attorney was flourishing an unlighted torch before the audience. But it took only an hour for the jury to decide that witches are out of fashion in Massachusetts and no one is to be executed there on suspicion and on parrot-like police testimony.

Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden (Simon & Schuster, 3/12)

Later, he went further, arguing against capital punishment for any defendant: “That the punishment of murder by death does not tend to diminish or prevent that crime; that a man who is so far lost to reason as to conceive the commission of murder with deliberate and premeditated malice aforethought does not enter into a discussion with himself of the consequences of the crime; that the infliction of the death penalty is not in accord with the present advance of civilization, and that it is a relic of barbarism, which the community must surely outgrow, as it has already outgrown the rack, the whipping post, and the stake.