Sylvia Plath Quotes

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

I thought about dying whenever I got bad news about other people.

These days, my subjects are murder and mayhem and other terrible things that happen to people - things that are even worse than cutting yourself shaving. And these are not the sorts of things you feel the need to experience before you write about them.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

Blood and death. That moves me.

I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.

I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.

I'm becoming more squeamish. I didn't use to be - nine years of 'Silent Witness' prepared me for most things one will have the misfortune to see in life. Before, I'd be wading up to my neck in gore, but now I tend to look away.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape - I remember it all.

We're all painfully aware of how suddenly violence can occur, how crippling it is, and how survivors have to find a way back from that.

if he goes and dies on me now, I know I'll go completely insane.

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

Maybe it was a good thing that Bones was putting Don's remains away instead of me. With my current emotional state, I'd probably think the only safe place for his ashes was tucked inside my clothes next to the garlic and weed.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

Killing rips the soul apart.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

I think culture is where things change in us deeply. But right now, I think that people are very traumatised. They are very scared. Having grown up in a house with a perpetrator who was violent every day and terrorising every day, I feel like that this country is suddenly very much like the house and the family I grew up in. Every day we are glued to our phones, glued to our television; "What is this psychopath going to do next? How will he embarrass us? Who will he bully or hurt or humiliate today? It's so easy to get locked into a syndrome where the perpetrator is ruling your life.

I am back in LA now. And I keep thinking back to my time in New York after the bombings.... I was crying so much I could not see, and the other diners joined in, and I thought, What do you do with such atheistic evil?

So much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life's relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity. This wasnt her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasnt over, it had only begun. Well ok then, Okay.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.