Scene Of The Crime Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Scene Of The Crime. Here they are! All 100 of them:

We're standing here, beat to shit, walking away from a crime scene where either or both of us could have bought it, and you're asking me to marry you?" "Perfect timing.
J.D. Robb (Glory in Death (In Death, #2))
Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.
Fredrik Backman (Beartown (Beartown, #1))
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip... The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
Okay. Now you have to move your arms and legs.” “I know how to make a snow angel.” “Then do it! Otherwise, you’re more like a chalk outline at a police crime scene.
Richelle Mead (Blood Promise (Vampire Academy, #4))
Patience is the antidote to the restless poison of the Ego. Without it we all become ego-maniacal bulls in china shops, destroying our future happiness as we blindly rush in where angels fear to tread. In these out-of-control moments, we bulldoze through the best possible outcomes for our lives, only to return to the scene of the crime later to cry over spilt milk.
Anthon St. Maarten (Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny)
When Filch wasn't guarding the scene of the crime, he was skulking red-eyed through the corridors, lunging out at unsuspecting students and trying to put them in detention for things like "breathing loudly" and "looking happy.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
Because whatever he thinks I am, I'm not. And whatever he thinks my body is, it isn't. My Body is a torture chamber. It's a fucking crime scene.
Amber Smith (The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1))
Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.
Terry Pratchett (Nation)
The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
Two psychics, two werewolves, and a psychic human alpha walk up to a crime scene...
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves, #3))
Everything about my heart is a crime scene. I drink to forget things it takes me 2 beers to name. I pour my breath into things only worth forgetting. I have nothing left to say to the ghosts. Their cold hands and bitter mouths keep kissing me awake when I have asked them nicely and then not-so-nicely to be left alone. I have nothing left to say to the ghosts. Two decades full of nothing but monsters and crime scenes and sometimes I am the monster and sometimes I am the crime scene. There is nothing I would undo so much as things I wish would wake up forgotten.
Clementine von Radics
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.
Michelle McNamara (I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer)
I won’t touch you,” I assured him, knowing I could throw a burst of energy that would undoubtedly drop the curtain on the moment. “I have it under control.” He traced the line of my clavicle with this finger and kissed the corners of my mouth. “Not even if I ask? I want your fingerprints all over me like a crime scene.
Dannika Dark (Twist (Mageri, #2; Mageriverse #2))
You wouldn't think that people would believe that we all got so incredibly beat up—in so many interesting ways—from a bear attack. Especially not when Carmel is sporting a bite mark that is a spot-on match for wounds found at one of the most horrifying crime scenes in recent history. But I never fail to be surprised by what people will believe.
Kendare Blake (Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna, #1))
Immediately after that fate-filled evening in May, the phone booth in its entirety had been confiscated by the Homicide Unit as embodying significant criminal evidence of murder. More accurately, though, the booth was like an envelope encapsulating the entire crime scene, including splattered skull fragments.
Tom Baldwin (Macom Farm)
So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.
Martin Luther King Jr.
What you lack in any investigation is time. With every passing hour, evidence slips away. Crime scenes are compromised by people and the elements. Things are moved, altered, smeared, shifted. Organisms rot. Wind blows dust and contaminants. Memories change and fade. As you move away from the event, you move away from the solution.
Maureen Johnson (Truly, Devious (Truly Devious, #1))
Rule number one of crime scene work: If it's wet and sticky and it ain't yours, don't touch it. -Terry Cooper, crime scene specialist, Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Beverly Connor (Dead Guilty (Diane Fallon #2))
Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.
Aimee Mann
You broke the Man Code, dude. 'No man shall knowingly and with malice aforethought kick another man in the nuts.'" "Okay, so I kicked him in the nuts. The little fucker was fleeing the scene of a crime where he'd pointed a weapon at my buddies." [from short story "Beer Run" at the end of Skin Deep]
Pamela Clare (Skin Deep (I-Team, #5.5))
Bedrooms are like crime scenes. So many clues to be uncovered.
Krystal Sutherland (Our Chemical Hearts)
After what she's been through, there really should be crime scene tape around her heart.
John Mark Green
You! You can’t just walk in here! This is a crime scene!” “That would explain the dead bodies, then,” she replied. He blinked dumbly, and she sighed. Wasting good sarcasm was annoying.
P. Djèlí Clark (A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1))
At 1 A.M. a parking garage feels like a crime scene in waiting.
Drew Magary (The Hike)
There are certain clues at a crime scene which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being collected or examined. How's one collect love, rage, hatred, fear...? These are things that we're trained to look for.
James Reece
A uniform cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. The M.E. pulled in and parked. There were two EMT trucks idling at the edge of the lot. I’d stayed close to the back door, and one of the Rangeman guys had taken a position two feet from me, standing at parade rest. No doubt in my mind he’d take a bullet for me rather than face Ranger over a dead Stephanie.
Janet Evanovich (Smokin' Seventeen (Stephanie Plum, #17))
Perhaps it's true you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
The South is America’s longest running crime scene.
Jason Mott (Hell of a Book)
We get a lot of calls where the person is murdered at home, but is not found for a period of time. And so the animals have already started to take the body apart because they haven't been fed in that period. So your evidence is being chewed up by the family pet. I tell you - Dogs are more loyal than cats. Cats will wait only a certain period of time and they'll start chewing on you. Dogs will wait a day or two before they just can't take the starving anymore. So, keep that in mind when choosing a pet. You know how a cat just stares at you, maybe at the top of the TV, from across the room? That's because they're watching to see if you're gonna stop breathing.
Connie Fletcher (Every Contact Leaves a Trace)
Jack? It’s Margeaux.” “My sister? Why would my sister be calling me? How did she get my number? Crazy questions blipped through my head. I knew she had married and was living in New Orleans, but we rarely spoke and have never been close by any means” “Margeaux?” “I’m calling from the police station. Dad was just brought in and I thought I should let you know.” “What! Why was he brought in?” “Jack, he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He drove himself into New Orleans to Quest Diagnostic for some blood tests and he was waiting to be called. Apparently, they took other people back that had come in after him. He got upset and made a scene. The staff tried to explain that those people all had appointments and he didn’t. He became so abusive, they called security, but before they even got there, Dad knocked down one of the technicians. That’s when they called the police. They came and took him.
Behcet Kaya (Treacherous Estate (Jack Ludefance, #1))
She chuckled, leaned on him as they headed out of the park. “All in all, it was a hell of a party.” “Hmm. We’ll have others. But there’s one thing.” “Hmm?” She flexed her fingers, relieved that they seemed to be back in full working order. The MTs knew their stuff. “I want you to marry me.” “Uh-huh. Well, we’ll—” She stopped, nearly stumbled, then gaped at him with her good eye. “You want what?” “I want you to marry me.” He had a bruise on his jaw, blood on his coat, and a gleam in his eye. She wondered if he’d lost his mind. “We’re standing here, beat to shit, walking away from a crime scene where either or both of us could have bought it, and you’re asking me to marry you?” He tucked his arm around her waist again, nudged her forward. “Perfect timing.
J.D. Robb (Glory in Death (In Death, #2))
As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. Instead--she did not know why--they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. Whatever happened she would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
Get your hand off me,” I exclaimed, voice loud with misplaced anger as I yanked away from his grip. “I’m a professional, not some distraught girlfriend.” Well, I was that too, but I knew how to act at a crime scene.
Kim Harrison (For a Few Demons More (The Hollows, #5))
I can provide a witness who didn’t see me at the scene of the crime. That witness can also prove they didn’t see me anywhere else either, thus showing that I didn’t exist at that moment in time.
Jarod Kintz (99 Cents For Some Nonsense)
But if there were some version of luminol, the stuff they use to find blood at crime scenes, to detect the presence of grief, half the people we pass on the street would light up like Christmas trees. I
Darcey Bell (A Simple Favor)
So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overhead remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch #2))
And then they would watch her closely as the dark, coagulated masses took form before her eyes, became flesh and bone, became gradually human. For all their show of reluctance, she had a sense that they enjoyed introducing her to these horrors, as seducers took pleasure in the corruption of innocence.
Philip Sington (The Einstein Girl)
All objects in the universe are unique. No two things that happen by chance ever happen in exactly the same way. No two things are ever constructed or manufactured in exactly the same way. No two things wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever break in exactly the same way.
Joe Nickell
The footprints go this way," said Cuddy, "and then they return. But the ones coming back aren't so deep as the ones going. You can see they're later ones because they're over the top of the other ones. So he was heavier than he was coming back, yes?" "Right," said Detritus. "So that means...?" "He lose weight?
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2))
You need me, just whistle," he said as he arranged his ball cap over his eyes against the sun leaking through the frost-emptied branches. "You're not coming?" Lifting the brim of his cap, he eyed me, "You want me to?" he asked blandly. "Not really, no." He dropped the brim and laced his hands over his middle. "Then why are you bitching? It's a crime scene, not a grocery store.
Kim Harrison (A Perfect Blood (The Hollows, #10))
Glenn... I wasn't expecting this. He's not after my blood, and we like the same stuff." From the rearview mirror, Jenks snickered. "Guns, violence, crime scene photos, leather, sex, and women. Yeah, I can see that." (Ivy and Jenks)
Kim Harrison (Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows, #8))
Cameron looked up at the ceiling, biting her tongue. Of all the murder and she-had-no-friggin’-clue-what-else-but-something-that-apparently-involved-the-FBI crime scenes in all the hotels in all of Chicago, Jack Pallas had to walk into this one.
Julie James (Something About You (FBI/US Attorney, #1))
Do you know science just proved an atom can exist in two places at the same time? No one is ever only at the scene of their crimes. Each of us is always also somewhere holy.
Andrea Gibson (Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry))
Bat stood in the open door and said "I am a crime scene unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do.
Warren Ellis (Gun Machine)
But the important thing here is to remember to practice self-care in times of stress. Take a walk, paint a picture, murder someone, burn the body, and clean up the crime scene.
Jill Shalvis (Rainy Day Friends (Wildstone, #2))
Getting out of the house. Every. Single. Day. The best thing you can do for yourself, your sanity, and your baby is to leave the scene of the crime. Leave the place with the dishes in the sink and the overflowing Diaper Genie. Put your baby in a carrier or a stroller and go on a walk around the neighborhood. Put in some headphones and listen to Beyoncé or Adele or a podcast on business ethics. Do whatever you have to do to remind yourself that there is a life beyond your nest and that you are still part of it.
Rachel Hollis (Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be (Girl, Wash Your Face Series))
witness two scenes. In one, an angry, bitter man beats another man to death in an alley in the Gadrobi District. In the other, a man of vast wealth conspires with equally wealthy compatriots to raise yet again the price of grain, making the cost of simple bread so prohibitive that families starve, are led into lives of crime, and die young. Are both acts of violence?
Steven Erikson (Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8))
There is always the chance that something else is influencing the data, causing the link. Between 1993 and 2008 the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious ‘phantom of Heilbronn’, a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s ‘most dangerous woman’ and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.
Matt Parker (Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors)
I wanted a reminder that things can still grow out of emptiness. I wanted a reminder that things can still grow in this small, yellow room even though you’re not in it. And I keep buying books even though nothing holds my attention anymore. I have them stacked up to the ceiling. I have them stacked up to the moon. I broke a bottle of red nail polish all over the kitchen floor, but it almost all came up with just a little remover. It looked like cleaning up after a crime scene. It felt like cleaning up after you left me. Just takes a little elbow grease. Just takes a little time.
Trista Mateer (Honeybee)
The Way Damaged People Love Damaged people love you like you are a crime scene before a crime has even been committed They keep their running shoes beside their souls every night, one eye open in case things change whilst they sleep. Their backs are always tense as though waiting to fight a sudden storm that might engulf them. Because damaged people have already seen hell. And damaged people understand that every evil demon That exists down their was once a kind angel before it fell.
Nikita Gill
I imagined there were people out there in the darker shadows, some dragging their feet like the walking dead, some scanning like predators, some cowering like victims. I wanted to absorb it all, suck it down, destroy it—the vision, the scene, the barbarism.
Jonathan Epps (No Winter Lasts Forever (The American Wrath Trilogy))
If being young is a crime scene,” I said, “the evidence from that night is everywhere.
Andrew O'Hagan (Mayflies)
She cried the first time she was pulled over by a cop. I explained to her that there is no reason to cry when getting pulled over--unless you're coming directly from from a crime scene.
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
Yes, I knew how to keep a secret since I was a girl and saw my uncle murder Zeke. I had learned to act like nothing had ever happened, how to walk across the crime scene and smile against my fears.
G.M. Monks (Iola O)
NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS this – or cares probably – but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says ‘Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.
Terry Hayes (I Am Pilgrim (Pilgrim, #1))
Lots of people perish on the highways. All those faces should be preserved, engagements kept, promises upheld. Impossible. I walked out instantly. Fleeing the scene of a crime. That kind of game can destroy you. Anyway, I've never known who I was. I authorize my biographer to simply call me "a man," and I wish him luck. I've been unable to lengthen my stride, my breath, or my sentences. He won't understand the first thing about this story. Neither do I. We're even.
Patrick Modiano (La Ronde de nuit)
It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.
Colson Whitehead (Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2))
Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can't plan beyond their sightlines. They're caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.
Michelle McNamara
Now I found myself at a windy crime scene in the middle of Manhattan rush hour, gore on the sidewalk, blue lights and yellow tape, a crowd of gawkers, grim cops, and coworkers who kept using the word “clusterfuck.” I was hooked.
Judy Melinek (Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner)
While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn't make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn't his own fault. he wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive: it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of it's causes.
Fredrik Backman (Beartown (Beartown, #1))
Wes hits the table. "You broke into a crime scene without me?" "Be glad, Wes, or we would have both been caught." "We're a team, Mac. You don't go committing crimes without your partner in crime. Besides, if I'd been with you, we probably wouldn't have been caught. I could have stood at the door and made wild bird sounds or something when the cops came back. And if we did get caught, or mugshots would look fabulous.
V.E. Schwab (The Unbound (The Archived, #2))
Crime scenes of pure sex, thorns on her body, blow-dry.
Laura Gentile (Seraphic Addiction)
He easily outran everyone, bolting deeper into the forest like a coked-up hooker fleeing a crime scene.
Robert Bevan (Critical Failures)
You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, don’t you think? Bedrooms are like crime scenes - so many clues to be uncovered.
Krystal Sutherland (Our Chemical Hearts)
Please behave. This is a crime scene, and you can’t give me another one.” Her tone is joking, but also serious.
S.T. Abby (All the Lies (Mindf*ck, #4))
In real life, you only get one shot at the homicide crime scene.
Vernon J. Geberth
Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.
Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)
I'm sorry, we can't come to the phone right now 'cause we're dead. Feel free to leave a message, but if we don't get back to you, it's probably 'cause we're dead. Have a nice day now.
Alan Emmins (Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners)
It was always the same for her when she arrived to meet the body. After she unbuckled her seat belt, after she pulled a stick pen from the rubber band on the sun visor, after her long fingers brushed her hip to feel the comfort of her service piece, what she always did was pause. Not long. Just the length of a slow deep breath. That's all it took for her to remember the one thing she will never forget. Another body waited. She drew the breath. And when she could feel the raw edges of the hole that had been blown in her life, Detective Nikki Heat was ready. She opened the car door and went to work . . . Heat could have made it easier on herself by parking closer, but this was another of her rituals: the walk up. Every crime scene was a flavor of chaos, and these two hundred feet afforded the detective her only chance to fill the clean slate with her own impressions.
Richard Castle
Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear - they do one harm after they're past and gone, not merely when they're in prospect. Even when they're over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal's anxiety doesn't end with the commission of the crime, even if it's undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don't do one any harm, they're fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.
Seneca (Letters from a Stoic)
People, like buildings, have facades. Tom created his. His walk was a feat. It had taken him twenty years of killing bad guys and a pair of Tony Lama boots to perfect the illusion. He made sure that everyone felt it by the third clunk of his boot heel. When he entered a crime scene there was a hush, and no one ever quite knew why they were holding their breath. But he did. A crime scene was theater and the stage was his.
Michael Ben Zehabe
Definitions vary, but the most useful comes from the National Institute of Justice, which describes it as a “series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually . . . by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time, ranging from hours to years. Quite often, the motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.
Harold Schechter (Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer)
In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.
Lynn Austin (A Proper Pursuit)
I have always felt that suicide was connected to communication. Not due to a lack of opportunity, but to an impossibility to communicate and be understood. It can be frustrating to try to share something with somebody, something important and real to you, and see in the face of another person that he doesn't care or, worse still, simply doesn't understand you. Of course, it is inevitable that this will happen from time to time, but imagine if it were always that way. Imagine if every time you tried to communicate and connect with another human being you fell short. If you never make any sense to anybody, if you never connect, you hold no value: you are truly alone. There are those who can survive as genuine outsiders, and then there are those who can't.
Alan Emmins (Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners)
A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo’s scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare’s Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can’t point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it’s the entire work—all the pieces working together to create an overall effect—that leads to enduring greatness.
John C. Maxwell (How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life)
The massive bronze gates were wide open now, too late. Inside, the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque place gleaming with high-powered searchlights, blue flashlight flares, winking pocket torches. Uniformed men were already swarming about. Red cigarette-embers showed oddly amidst the headstones here and there. ("The Street Of Jungle Death")
Cornell Woolrich (Vampire's Honeymoon)
On May 25, something unexpected happened. Police opened the school up so families of the library victims could walk through the scene. This served two functions: victims could face the crime scene with their loved ones, and revisiting the room might jar loose memories or clarify confusion. Three senior investigators stood by to answer questions and observe.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
Look, there’s no nice way to ask this, so I’m just going to put it out there: Do you think you might grow out of the crazy any time soon? Because I have a lot of questions about my father, and my mother’s missing, and trying to do crime scene via sing-along is starting to stress me out.” “You begin to sound like your princeling, little lily,” Gwenllian said. “And I’m not sure that’s your place. Which is to say, carry on. I’m all for ranks of usurping women.
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
Ready, Rachel? I’d like your opinion on the lab that was broken into.” His eyes flicked past us to the closed nursery door before coming back to us, his smile fading as he noticed Ceri’s tension. I was such a coward. “You want me to look at a crime scene? That’s a switch,” I said
Kim Harrison (A Perfect Blood (The Hollows, #10))
People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.
Ben Marcus (Notable American Women)
During the first few days a total of forty-three officers would visit the crime scene, looking for weapons and other evidence. In searching the loft above the living room, Sergeant Mike McGann found a film can containing a roll of video-tape. Sergeant Ed Henderson took it to the Police Academy, which had screening facilities. The film showed Sharon and Roman Polanski making love. With a certain delicacy, the tape was not booked into evidence but was returned to the loft where it had been found.
Vincent Bugliosi (Helter Skelter)
I keep finding the ashes of the man I unequivocally loved, everywhere. Everytime, I go to bed, they are displaced about my covers when memories flood back in my mind. When I glance at my skin, the ashes are smeared on my skin like hand prints from a tragic crime scene. When you cross my mind, the ashes of moments of intimacy fall to my heart, my body forcefully expell them through my lungs and tear ducts. The ashes spew out in an eruption of utter chaos. The ashes block out my perception of love and self value. My sight is distorted to truth and trust. The particles of ashe prevent me from forgetting. ANONYMOUS
Starr.
What are we looking for?" "I don't know-evidence?" Mikey said, sitting behind the keyboard, pretending to hack. I laughed. "This is so Crime Scene Extreme seriously though, is it even possible to view log-in records user-side?" "Hmm, yes," Mikey said tapping his finger on his pseudointellectually. "You're right. This sounds like a job for a Crackhead.
Rae Mariz (The Unidentified)
showed him some of the gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let him experience recordings made by killers while they were torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of prison. Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, “I had no idea there were people out there who could do anything like this.” An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: “The experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all time.
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit (Mindhunter #1))
I have to clean up first. I’m still all sweaty and stuff from the crime scene.” I realized he was wearing a white shirt and I might have dried blood on me. It made me draw back and look at the front of him. “What is wrong, ma petite?” “I may have dried blood and things on me, and you’re wearing white.” He drew me back into his arms. “I would rather hold you close than worry about my clothes. The shirt will wash, or we can throw it away. I do not care.” I pushed back just enough to turn my face up, resting my chin on his chest so that I gazed up the line of his body, and he looked down so that our eyes met down the line of his chest. “I know you love me, but when you don’t care about your clothes, I know it’s true love for you.” I grinned as I said it. He laughed, abrupt, surprised, and for a moment I got to see what he must have looked like centuries ago before being a vampire had taught him to control his face and show nothing for fear it would be used against him by those more powerful than him. I smiled up at him, held as close to him as I could with clothes and weapons still on, and loved him. I loved that I could make him laugh like that, loved that he felt safe enough to show me this part of him, loved that even when we were ass-deep in alligators, being with each other made it better. The alligators would be chewing on our asses either way, but with each other it was more fun, and we were more likely to be able to make a matching set of alligator luggage out of our enemies rather than end up as their dinner. I gazed up at him as the laughter filled his face, and just loved him. The day had sucked, but Jean-Claude made it suck a lot less, and that was what love was supposed to do. It was supposed to make things better, not worse, which made me wonder if Asher truly loved anyone. I pushed the thought away, and enjoyed the man in my arms, and the fact that I had made him laugh.
Laurell K. Hamilton (Kiss the Dead (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #21))
I eyed Zee. “How would you like to come with us to look at a crime scene?” Zee shook his head. “No.” “You are staying here,” Adam told me firmly. “Your feet hurt.” — We all went, of course. “Alpha werewolf meets coyote,” murmured George gleefully from the back of Adam’s SUV as I hopped in. “Fae—” “Stop,” said Zee, climbing in beside him. George didn’t lose his grin, but he quit talking. George was not stupid.
Patricia Briggs (Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson, #13))
THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
He loved his job, which allowed time to do it without comparing his performance to others'. He loved the economics of death: hastening a person's passage into the afterlife not only provided him with a good living: it gave work to coroners, beat cops, detectives, crime scene technicians, the people who made fingerprint powder and luminal and other sundry chemicals and devices - not to mention firearm, ammunition, coffin, and tissue manufacturers - obituary writers, crime reporters, novelists.
Robert Liparulo (Germ: If You Breathe, It Will Find You)
A sick man's dreams are often extraordinarily distinct and vivid and extremely life-like. A scene may be composed of the most unnatural and incongruous elements, but the setting and presentation are so plausible, the details so subtle, so unexpected, so artistically in harmony with the whole picture, that the dreamer could not invent them for himself in his waking state, even if he were an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev. Such morbid dreams always make a strong impression on the dreamer's already disturbed and excited nerves, and are remembered for a long time.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow," Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother's words, "told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
And yet often when I was out in the park or the woods, say, with my own little girls, I'd seen something and think to myself, That's just like the such-and-such scene, where we found the eight-year-old. As fearful as I was for their safety, seeing the things I saw, I also found it difficult to get emotionally involved in the minor, but important, scrapes and hurts of childhood. When I would come home and Pam would tell me that one of the girl had fallen off her bike and needed stitches, I'd flash to the autopsy of some child her age and think of all the stitches it had taken the medical examiner to close her wounds for burial.
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
Watching Nigel Farage rudely insult fellow members of the European Parliament today - the first occasion they were all assembled in Brussels since the tragic 'Brexit' referendum result - made me feel utterly ashamed to be British. Let it be known that Nigel Farage is the very epitomy of a narrow-minded 'Little Englander' who does not represent the vast majority of outward-looking people from Great Britain. His shameful and unofficial campaign to convince the British electorate to leave the European Union was peppered with lies and deceit. His populist and xenophobic rhetoric has also subsequently contributed to ugly scenes of racial abuse and hate crime directed at Eastern European nationals and ethnic minorities living and working in the UK, in the wake of the referendum result. Fellow Europeans, world citizens, let this be a wake-up call. Deny your own domestic peddlers of populism and nationalism the opportunity to follow the example of this unelected, disrespected maverick, intent on making a name for himself, for he has unwittingly unleashed a wrecking ball on Britain's future economic prosperity, cultural diversity and social harmony.
Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
there's a part in the essay that kind of does this academic "Let's unpack the idea of Lynchian and what Lynchian means is something about the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal," and then it gives a series of scenarios about what -- what is and what isn't Lynchian. Jeffrey Dahmer was borderline Lynchian...what was Lynchian was having the actual food products next to the disembodied bits of the corpse. I guess the big one is, you know, a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the man -- if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and the woman -- let's see, the woman's '50s bouffant is undisturbed and the man and the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy, say, for instance, Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is, and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there were major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn't recognize those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian -- this weird confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell, banal, American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while -- I mean, at least since -- at least since "Blue Velvet.
David Foster Wallace
99 Problems is almost a deliberate provocation to simpleminded listeners. If that sounds crazy, you have to understand: Being misunderstood is almost a badge of honor in rap. Growing up as a black kid from the projects, you can spend your whole life being misunderstood, followed around department stores, looked at funny, accused of crimes you didn't commit, accused of motivations you don't have, dehumanized -- until you realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke's on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting. It's like when we were kids. You'd start bopping hard and throwing the ice grill when you step into Macy's and laugh to yourself when security guards got nervous and started shadowing you. You might have a knot of cash in your pocket, but you boost something anyway, just for the sport of it. Fuck 'em. Sometimes the mask is to hide and sometimes it's to play at being something you're not so you can watch the reactions of people who believe the mask is real. Because that's when they reveal themselves. So many people can't see that every great rapper is a not just a documentarian, but a trickster -- that every great rapper has a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Flav in them -- but that's not our problem, it's their failure: the failure, or unwillingness, to treat rap like art, instead of acting like it's a bunch of niggas reading out of their diaries. Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.
Jay-Z
You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you a break and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, but least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn't just lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, mayb...more "You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was, especially with women, submit, give in, maybe the guy will give you a break and not kill you. Now, maybe you will get raped, but least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn't just lie down and take it. You don't know how many home-invasion scenes we walk in on where the people are sitting there all tied up and all dead. There'll be four, five people, a family, maybe some guests: enough to put up a fight. And you know they let themselves get tied up. You just know the guys said, 'We just want to tie you up. We won't hurt you.' You'd think the people would realize — why do they want to tie us up if they don't want to hurt us? But they bought it. It always gives us a little chuckle.
Connie Fletcher (What Cops Know: Today's Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America's Streets)
No one has been able to aggregate more intention data on what consumers like than Google. Google not only sees you coming, but sees where you’re going. When homicide investigators arrive at a crime scene and there is a suspect—almost always the spouse—they check the suspect’s search history for suspicious Google queries (like “how to poison your husband”). I suspect we’re going to find that U.S. agencies have been mining Google to understand the intentions of more than some shopper thinking about detergent, but cells looking for fertilizer to build bombs. Google controls a massive amount of behavioral data. However, the individual identities of users have to be anonymized and, to the best of our knowledge, grouped. People are not comfortable with their name and picture next to a list of all the things they have typed into the Google query box. And for good reasons. Take a moment to imagine your picture and your name above everything you have typed into that Google search box. You’ve no doubt typed in some crazy shit that you would rather other people not know. So, Google has to aggregate this data, and can only say that people of this age or people of this cohort, on average, type in these sorts of things into their Google search box. Google still has a massive amount of data it can connect, if not to specific identities, to specific groups.
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
Did you ever hear what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s head? It was originally lashed to the roof of Westminster Hall as a potent warning not to mess with the government of the day, but in 1685 a violent storm blew it off its perch and a captain of the guard had it away and hid it up his chimney, where it stayed until he admitted the crime on his death bed. So can you picture the scene? Cromwell died in 1658. 27 years later this geezer nicks his head and shoves it up his chimney. He’s about to croak it, the whole family’s gathered around his death bed, everybody’s in tears and they’re all wondering if he’ll come out with any famous last words. Perhaps, “Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your father,” or maybe, “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” or even, “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something.” Not this fucking joker! No! What does he say? He says, “Here Jackie, the sausages tasted a bit off tonight. Did I ever tell you I nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head and shoved it up the chimney? It’s still there,” and he draws back the veil of his earthly life and succumbs to eternal peace. They all look at each other, “What did he fucking say?” “He said he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head.” “What do you mean; he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head?” “That’s what he said, don’t blame me!” “Fuck’s sake!” “Well, do you think we should look?” “Don’t talk bollocks! You honestly want to look up the chimney to see if Oliver Cromwell’s head’s up there?” “I’m just saying …..” Anyway, one of them had a look up the chimney, found the head and by 1710 it was appearing in a freak show under the banner, ‘The Monster’s Head.’ True story
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))