“To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive.”

“Well, did he do it?"She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.”

“He couldn't control what he felt, but he could certainly control what he DID.”

“And into its bland merciless face what did he have to show as his proof that he deserved to live? - Nothing but that he was afraid to die.”

“It doesn't matter what did or did not happen then. It only matters what happens NOW.”

“It is at least as possible for a Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and Becket. Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”