Scott Turow

“Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.”

“After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.”

“This is life. You know the philosphers? The Present never stops. There's only the Present. You cheat life if you live in the Past.”

“It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.”

“The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight.”

“Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.”

“It was something like stirring concrete with my eyelashes.”

“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”

“He smiled hesitantly and she smiled back in the same fashion, but he was unsettled by the thought that Muriel had undergone a transformation. Some of the stuff that had come out of her mouth lately, about God or babies, made him wonder if she’d had a brain transplant at some point in the last ten years. It was funny what happened to people after forty, when they realized that our place here on earth was leased, not owned.”

“Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome. ”

“Every American is from somewhere else. Each is hated for what he brings that is different from the rest. We live in uneasy peace. But it is peace, for the most part. ”

“The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.”

“The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. ”

“The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of evreyone, and withich, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.”

“I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.”

“What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.”

“As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system--the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges--would take care of that; they didn't need his help.”

“It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy.”

“Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.”