Violent Death Quotes

“To kill was to be doomed. To kill was to die, yourself.”
― Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

“Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.”
― P. D. James

“Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them.”
― P.D. James, The Private Patient

“Then his fingers trembled on her ankle—tightened around her foot. His head shifted, turning toward her. With a growl, she crashed the poker down onto his head. His hand jerked. A gurgling noise arose, not from his throat but from his chest, from deep down, as if he were fighting for something. Struggling. His eyes shifted toward her. Joan raised the poker again. The gurgling stopped—not abruptly but in a final, lingering, prolonged, exhalation of breath. His lungs gradually expelled every last atom of oxygen.”
― Cate Campbell Beatty, Donor 23

“To the police," Lily said [speaking of five murders], "these five brutal murders are less than coincidence. One of them told me, 'There's no conspiracy, Lily. It's just life.' How do they come to think this way--that death is life? That unnatural death and murder are somehow a natural part of life?”
― Dean Koontz, The Good Guy

“What it had done, however, was to give him a feeling of power and control that had taken him back to how he used to feel every day.”
― Val McDermid, Insidious Intent

“It should be noted that even if the high-end estimate of fatalities directly or indirectly attributed to the Boko Haram insurgency were accepted at face value, they would still represent a small percentage of the overall violent deaths that have occurred in Nigeria over that same period of time.... According to UNODC data, Nigeria had 18,422 intentional homicides in 2008, the year after the violently contested elections.... Based on those numbers remaining relatively constant, Boko Haram would constitute approximately 5 per cent of all violent deaths in Nigeria since their peak in fatalities in 2009.”
― Zacharias Pieri, Boko Haram: Islamism, politics, security and the state in Nigeria