The image of him shifted with the violent frenzy of leaves. He was there and he wasn’t, as the leaves whipped and the lightning fell away in a slow strobe effect across the expanse of sky. How he had gotten up there, I had no idea, but he had been there. Crouched in the tree in the middle of the courtyard, he watched me intently through the open window.

There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.

His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it.

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming -- a fraction of a second, that's all -- Jacob would have thought of me -- who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes -- and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end -- as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him.

You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"It will not."If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me."I, also M. Ratchett."What's wrong with my proposition?"Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said.

Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren't sacred beings crafted in the Almighty's image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit." He mimicked my usual voice, very well. "'But why *me*, Henry, are we not friends?' Well, Adam, even friends are made out of meat.

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target.

But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each othe

He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.

He’ll think I’ll do it, he’ll act like I’ll do it, and so I will do it. But if he will think differently, maybe I will act differently. But I know me, I know him, he knows himself, he knows me, and he is my clone, so we will each act exactly how we think we will, and we will each act like the other, and this is why I’ll have to kill him.

You understand nothing," I told him with a weary shake of the head, but I would not try to make him understand. That there was no justification for it: the murder of another, no matter how vile. We had all been wrong and, blackest of ironies, I had known this to hold that precious and wondrous thing, life, in my hands. To hold it in my hands before I destroyed it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t trust a beautiful woman. One minute she’s smiling at you seductively, and the next she’s trying to stab you with the pen you wouldn’t use to sign a large check made out to her. That was hypothetical, of course, and not at all related to this beautiful woman, who may or may be a killer.

SWAT? For me?" Still trembling, one hand clung to the ambulance gurney, the other held a massive sterilised cotton wool wad under my nose."Tactical Support was busy. You got Dennis and Arlo," said Harry, speed-reading the papers he'd snatched from inside my jacket.Closest his hands had been to my chest in a long time."Which one broke my nose?""That'd be Dennis.

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

[Prince Humperdinck] was seventy-five minutes away from his first female murder, and he wondered if he could get his fingers to her throat before even the start of a scream. He had been practicing on giant sausages all the afternoon and had the movements down pretty pat, but then, giant sausages weren’t necks and all the wishing in the world wouldn’t make them so.