The Borden Murders 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.

Ms. Borden is Lizzy’s mother?

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

I would let the whole town think I’m a madwoman and a murderer, let it scorn and reject me, let its children compose hateful rhymes to be sung whilst jumping rope.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The “death play” of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.

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.

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.

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

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.

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