The Quote Garden ™

 I dig old books. ™

 Est. 1998

Home      Search      About      Contact      Terms      Privacy

Welcome to my page of quotations that have been referenced in the Criminal Minds television series. These are the quotes spoken by the characters at the opening and closing of the show. Not every quote from every episode is here, only those I've chosen to include. Each quotation is shown first as cited in the TV program, followed by the full quote and its original source. This page is from the thirteenth season, 2017 and 2018 airdates.  —ღ Terri


Criminal Minds, Blue Angel:  “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” ~George Moore


“Afterwards I sought thee hither and thither, till hearing of thee in Egypt I went there and sought thee from synagogue to synagogue.


A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it, Jesus answered gently, and in a tenderer voice than his scrannel peacock throat would have led one to expect. And as if foreseeing an ardent disciple he began to speak to Joseph of God, his speech moving on with a gentle motion like that of clouds wreathing and unwreathing, finding new shapes for every period, and always beautiful shapes. He often stopped speaking and his eyes became fixed, as if he saw beyond the things we all see; and after an interval he would begin to speak again...”


–George Moore, The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story, 1916


Criminal Minds, The Bunker:  “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” ~T. S. Eliot


“For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the


This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”


–T. S. Eliot, last lines of “The Hollow Men,” 1925


Criminal Minds, False Flag:  “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”


–Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892


Criminal Minds, Bad Moon on the Rise:  “It is the very error of the moon; she comes more nearer earth than she was wont, and makes men mad.” ~William Shakespeare


“It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.”


–William Shakespeare, Othello, 1604  [Act V, scene 2]


Criminal Minds, Bad Moon on the Rise:  “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.” ~Curt Siodmak


“Even a man who's pure in heart
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.”


–Curt Siodmak, The Wolf Man, 1941


Criminal Minds, Miasma:  “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” ~Pat Conroy


“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”


–Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides, 1986


Criminal Minds, Miasma:  “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.” ~William Faulkner


“Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.


And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.”


–Greg Iles, The Quiet Game, 1999


Criminal Minds, The Dance of Love:  “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ~Sylvia Plath


“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing. There are two opposing poles of wanting nothing: When one is so full and rich and has so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of one's being. When one is dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world: not all the woman, food, sun, or mind-magic of others that can reach the wormy core of one's gutted soul planet.”


–Sylvia Plath, journal, 1955 December 11th


Criminal Minds, All You Can Eat:  “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” ~Mark Twain


“Pandits... would cite the beautiful Aryá couplet, which was written at least three centuries before our era, and which pronounces the duty of a good man, even in the moment of his destruction, to consist not only in forgiving, but even in a desire of benefiting, his destroyer, as the Sandal-tree, in the instant of its overthrow, sheds perfume on the axe, which fells it...”


–William Jones, lecture, “On the Philosophy of the Asiaticks,” 1794


“Forgiveness is the perfume which flowers give when trampled upon.”


–Quoted in The Sacred Circle, Volume I, edited by Edmonds, Dexter, & Warren, 1855


Garson O’Toole, the Quote Investigator, wrote a detailed article tracing the origins of the forgiveness fragrance quotation. Spoiler: It's not Twain. See: quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/30/violet-forgive


Criminal Minds, Mixed Signals:  “Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future.” ~Daphne Rose Kingma


“We need to let go because whatever we're holding on to is keeping us attached to the problem. Hanging on is fear; letting go is hope. Holding on is believing that there's only a past; letting go is knowing that there's a future. In letting go, we surrender the weight of our burdens and find the lightness of being with which to begin once again.”


–Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart: An Emotional and Spiritual Handbook, 2010


Criminal Minds, Believer:  “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” ~Oscar Wilde


“Erskine,” I answered, “it is your duty to give this theory to the world. If you will not do it, I will. By keeping it back you wrong the memory of Cyril Graham, the youngest and the most splendid of all the martyrs of literature. I entreat you to do him justice. He died for this thing, — don't let his death be in vain.”


Erskine looked at me in amazement. “You are carried away by the sentiment of the whole story,” he said. “You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”


–Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H,” 1889

Home      Search      About      Contact      Terms      Privacy

published 2018 Dec 22
last saved 2022 Aug 20
www.quotegarden.com/quotestudy-criminal-minds-season-13.html