William Landay

“The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.”

“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.”

“So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.”

“Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.”

“I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.”

“We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.”

“There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.”

“Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you”

“An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.”

“I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.”

“The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories...But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.”

“This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.”

“All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.”

“Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh.He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.”

“I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.”

“It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.”

“At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically.I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.”

“I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date.”

“Why risk the rare happy marriage-rarer still, a love marriage that endures-for something as common and toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you.”

“My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.”

“A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk.”

“You're staring.''You're my wife. I'm allowed to stare.''Is that the rule?''Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I'm a lawyer.”

“Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen...witnesses. The world looks away, and why not?”

“no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed”

“But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.”

“Predisposition is not predestination.”

“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.”

“I admit--no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed-”

“We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.”

“At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.”

“The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.”

“....I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.”

“The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.”

“...don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. To hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.”

“It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...”