Quotes & Sayings About Alibi

You want to find your self in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance . . . I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I'd have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being by myself. — Charles D'Ambrosio

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. — Clare Boothe Luce

An alibi is only as good as its details. — Kenneth Eade

Hey, Kami. I was wondering if I could get a dance with the best-looking girl in the room."
"Sure," Kami said. "Go ask Angela. Take your life in your hands. I'll miss you and all, but I'm going to give her an alibi for the murder, because that's what best friends do. — Sarah Rees Brennan

'Home Alone' was a movie, not an alibi. — Jerry Orbach

I got an alibi, just in case you think I did it. Tighter than a crab's ass, and that is air tight. — James Ellroy

Honesty whispers, Don't get pricked by the thorns of lie. — Angelica Hopes

Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we've already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship . . . — Garth Risk Hallberg

God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash - it makes one vomit. — Aldous Huxley

It's the notion that there is no perfection - that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances. — Leonard Cohen

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.
Then let's be quiet together. — Leonard Cohen

External explanations of black-white differences - discrimination or poverty, for example - seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture. Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.
In short, prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag - and an alibi is for many an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily. — Thomas Sowell

It's painfully obvious to both of us that you're dangerously close to a sexless-related meltdown. And I went to Alibi last girls' night and there were plenty of straight people there, too, you know, but um. I mean, there were also lots of - "
"People!" Jon shouts, "Plenty of people. With, uh, orifices. — Seventhswan

But we can't alibi all our ills by just knocking the old banker. First he loaned the money, then the people all at once wanted it back, and he didn't have it. Now he's got it again, and is afraid to loan it, so the poor devil don't know what to do. — Will Rogers

Where's your sense of adventure? It died under mysterious circumstances. My sense of self-preservation found the body, but assures me it has an airtight alibi. -Captain Tagon & Captain Andreyasn — Howard Tayler

I need no alibi,I did steal your heart. — Sapphire Belucci

At least this time, with this murder, she knew he had an alibi. At the time Cicely Towers was having her throat slashed, Roarke had been fucking the hell out of the investigating officer. — J.D. Robb

I need an alibi. — Maya Banks

His friend arrived and prescribed painkillers and bed rest, giving Daniel the relief of knowing that at least Tiffany hadn't injured herself further. "If you ever find who did this to such a beautiful woman," his friend murmured to him as he packed up to leave, "I will be happy to provide you with an airtight alibi to cover whatever you choose to do to him. — Imani Black

The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. — Henry A. Kissinger

No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility. — Napoleon Hill

Never ask a man where's he's been. If he's out on legitimate business, he doesn't need an alibi. And, girls, if he has been out on illegitimate business, it's your own fault. — Mae West

You know, at parties, people always ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' Well, I don't have an alibi! — Emo Philips

They were only to glad to come, ... as an alibi to test their charms ... but once they'd made it into the house their hearts where in their boots because they knew enough to see that here Madame Verona was still living off the interest. — Dimitri Verhulst

We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges. — Albert Camus

It is necessary to fall in love ... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway. — Albert Camus

Don't speak if you don't have to about trivia. The time for joking comes because of the trust, and you have to earn the trust. So, I don't alibi for anything, and I'll take the heat. That's the other thing. Don't let them take the heat. We take the heat. — Phil Ramone

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.288 — Thomas Sowell

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory ... everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from. — Albert Camus

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. — Albert Camus

A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her I can see why he would want to stay home when he's got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor. — Tana French

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is "shock"; for the photographic "shock" consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. — Roland Barthes

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love. — Leonard Cohen

Irony serves as an alibi for a fetish. — Nathaniel Wing

The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility ... — Edmund Crispin

The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants. — Albert Camus

Besides that, when elsewhere the harvest of wheat is most abundant, there it comes up less by one-fourth than what you have sowed. There, methinks, it were a proper place for men to sow their wild oats, where they would not spring up.
[Lat., Post id, frumenti quum alibi messis maxima'st
Tribus tantis illi minus reddit, quam obseveris.
Heu! istic oportet obseri mores malos,
Si in obserendo possint interfieri.] — Plautus

Lucky Tyler: "Yeah, you're here, looking more like the preacher's wife come calling than an overnight alibi. Who's gonna believe I tumbled you?" The devil in him was kicking up his heels, goading him to say things he knew damn well would rub her the wrong way. But he felt he was justified in being ornery. He didn't particularly like her attitude either.
Devon Haines:"What did you expect me to wear? A negligee?"
Lucky Tyler: "I
— Sandra Brown

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us — Albert Camus

If you pick up a golfer and hold it close to your ear, like a conch shell, and listen, you will hear an alibi. — Fred Beck

None of us are pretty, but our ugly has an alibi. — Andrea Gibson

There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi. — Mignon McLaughlin

Sin always overpromises and underdelivers, while righteousness pays dividends for eternity...

Nothing is more illogical than sin. It's the epitome of poor judgment. It's temporary insanity with eternal consequences. And we have no alibi, save the cross of Jesus Christ. — Mark Batterson

No innocent person ever has an alibi. — Agatha Christie

Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibi — Leonard Cohen

For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A worldling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God? ... What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God. — Georges Bernanos

Let me deal with him. If he turns up dead in the river you'll know to keep your mouth shut and provide me an alibi. — Sally Thorne

The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important. — Isabel Paterson

An alibi is one alliterative consonant short of being a magic carpet — Josh Stern

I'm sure you could have. Fending off unwanted male attention is a skill every attractive woman must acquire. But you're also a lady who was reluctant to cause a scene.. (Hammond Cross) — Sandra Brown

An alibi is a reason with a bad reputation. — Doug Larson

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness. — Anais Nin

Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates. — Sue Grafton

I didn't have a heart until I meet you.
That smile is killin me too.
I can't look away.
Can I always stay?
I can't look away.
I need to stay.
I didn't have a heart until I meet you. — Jenni James

Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. Why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you'll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they're only a kind of fantasy one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get copped. However cleverly you've faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it's you who did it, and they'll pin it onto you somehow.
When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect -which gives you a little side glimpse of what people really think about marriage. — George Orwell

Faithful is the Lord, who has made himself our debtor, not by receiving any thing from us, but by promising us all things, (August. in Ps. 32, 109, et alibi). — John Calvin

Can you stand on your legs?" Sydelle Pulaski asked. "Can you walk at all?"
People never asked Chris those questions; they whispered them to his parents behind his back. "N-n-no. Why?"
"What better disguise for a thief or a murderer than a wheelchair, the perfect alibi."
Chris enjoyed being taken for the criminal type. Now they really were friends. — Ellen Raskin

The public wouldn't like the perfect umpire in every game. It would kill off baseball's greatest alibi - 'We was robbed.' — Billy Evans

Alcohol.
It can give the courage to talk dirty and the permission to go home with the bartender.
It's the alibi. The cover story.
It wasn't really you - you were possessed by Captain Morgan and the Grey Goose.
Unfortunately, I have a very high tolerance for alcohol.
Sucks to be me. — Emma Chase

The way I was brought up 'he needed killing' is an airtight alibi. — Lisa Kleypas

I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one. — Chuck Klosterman

Dispensing with the frivolity, he kissed her meaningfully. When at last he pulled away, her troubled expression alarmed him. "What?"
"Be careful, Hammond."
"No one will know I was here."
She shook her head. "Not that."
"Then what?"
"You may have to put me on trial for my life. Please be careful that you don't make me fall in love with you first. — Sandra Brown

Ordinarily, an alibi is an account of suspect's whereabouts at the time a crime was committed and it's offered up as proof of innocence, but here it didn't matter where anyone was. — Sue Grafton

Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl. — John Banville

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond recall. — P.G. Wodehouse

The "thesis neurosis" has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate. — Umberto Eco

What was the value, really, of an alibi between lovers, friends, or family members? Idea for greeting card: 'Will You Be My Alibi? — Jincy Willett

The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. — Emmanuel Levinas

People say movies are escapist, just entertainment, but I think that's only an alibi, a way of hiding from ourselves just how effective what we do actually is. When something is in a movie, and especially when something is in a particularly successful film, its language, its grammar, is added into the grammar of possible reality. The banal fact that sharks are terrifying was cemented into our cultural imagination after Jaws. We have no idea how much power we have and absolutely no idea how to use it. It's like we invent people's dreams. — Jacob Wren

As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything. — Nell Zink

Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God. — Thomas Paine

The world turned and flung me. — David Iserson

If fucking were graceful,desire an alibi. — Rita Dove

You met a guy in an alley, and he kissed you?
Is he still alive, or do I need to provide you with an alibi? — I.D. Locke

Think and then act. Never act and then alibi. — Henry Iba

You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven't one, you must fake one. You self confidence must be maintained. — Christy Mathewson

Dead is always a good alibi — Spencer Kope

Get a grip, Haskell. Find a target, blast it, cook up an alibi. What's complicated about that? — James A. Hetley

Her eyes, however, were every bit as hard and shiny as the varnish on Dad's desk.
"Sophie, there you are! Where have you been the past few days? We've hardly seen you."
"A-around?" I stuttered, inwardly cringing. Oh,that was an awesome alibi. — Rachel Hawkins

Ablaze with alabaster one must admit
as long as there is near music kicking around
nowhere more winsome than in the outlandish passage
from April to California, Sunday to Jose, March to French
and all the wilderness and Septembers in between.
Slow ghost thicket, a tempo of someone's own,
please please the quintessentially readymade
and risen stranger, the tremor in the house,
rather than some unfinished crime without dragon
or alibi in the drowsy garden.
O savage, O brightening Niagara,
O briefest, fussy thing in ruffled light,
wait, I am a stranger here myself. — Paul Vangelisti

When people say they're too busy, ask them If they'll have time to die, and see If dead's gonna give a damn. — Michael Bassey Johnson

A is for Alibi, my first book, was published in 1982. As it happened the next couple of books took place in June and August of that year. Without meaning to I painted myself into a corner. The other issue was the aging process. I did not want my main character to age one year for every book so I slowed the whole process down. This way I could get through all 26 letters of the alphabet without making her 109 years old in 2015. I might end the series in either 1990 or on New Years Eve 1989. — Sue Grafton

Equally widespread is the opposite doctrine of an "eternal antisemitism" in which Jew-hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem. That this doctrine was adopted by professional antisemites is a matter of course; it gives the best possible alibi for all horrors. If — Hannah Arendt

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise. — Eric Hoffer

It is necessary to have "watchers" at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere "ideas." These are MEASURES ... . Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their "truths" and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins. — Julius Evola

What is a photograph? For me, a fragment of quick-silver, a lucid dream, a scribbled note from the subconscious to be deciphered, perhaps, over years. It is a monologue trying to become a conversation, an offering, an alibi, a salute. — Eva Rubinstein

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance. — Will Rogers

From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it. She especially was affected. Whenever she stayed overnight in her rented room (which quickly became only an alibi for Tomas), she was unable to fall asleep; in his arms she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been. He would whisper impromptu fairy tales about her, or gibberish, words he repeated monotonously, words soothing or comical, which turned into vague visions lulling her through the first dreams of the night. He had complete control over her sleep: she dozed off at the second he chose. — Milan Kundera

Unfortunately, love is more often an alibi than a reason. — Luigina Sgarro

I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her ... '
' ... Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.'
' ... Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck. — John Connolly

Looking up is the biggest alibi ever invented to explain a terrible shot. By the time you look up, you've already made the mistake. — Harvey Penick

Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good ... — Milan Kundera

I graduated first in my class from alibi school. — Jeffrey McDaniel

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi. — Anita Brookner

And then the other guy will look really sheepish, and mumble that, okay, maybe he tried to make a run for it, and maybe he took a drunken swing at the arresting officer, and maybe he made a couple of off-color remarks about law-enforcement professionals, and maybe he's been hiding from the cops ever since an incident a few years back involving a bleeding hooker, nine pounds of cocaine, and a soiled image of Tipper Gore. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

Shit. Is this a good idea?
I'm a lawyer for Christ's sake.
I look at Lorelai and she looks so happy that I don't care anymore.
Screw it! If she wants to vandalise this prick's car, I'm game.
I can come up with an alibi for us both later ... — Joanne McClean

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself. — Hannah Arendt

He was like this when I got here?' That's you alibi? — Karen Chance

Don't ever accuse anyone of being full of pride, undignified and unprofessional when simply they are wise to move away from dishonest schemers.
Dishonesty comprise too of layers of lies simply casted for impressive appearances. There are times too that corrupt hearts have their own confused, modified, self-affirming, pro-self interest business inclined definitions of professionalism, integrity, dignity and pride. — Angelica Hopes

That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi from the great despairs we all suffer from. — Albert Camus