William Landay Quotes

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? ~ William Landay

The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To ~ William Landay

Practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law. ... [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, ~ 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. ~ William Landay

I did not speak. I have found in any Q&A, in court, in witness interviews, wherever, often the best thing you can do is wait, say nothing. The witness will want to fill the awkward silence. He will feel a vague compassion to keep talking, to prove he is not holding back, to prove he is smart and in the know, to earn your trust. ~ William Landay

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me. ~ William Landay

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far. ~ William Landay

you ever do it?" "It's a talent ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

One worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed - but after all, we were children. ~ William Landay

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design. ~ William Landay

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls. ~ William Landay

I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit. ~ William Landay

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance ... ~ William Landay

We're not arguing. We're discussing." "You're a lawyer; you don't know the difference. I'm arguing. ~ William Landay

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right. ~ William Landay

I never expectedto lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out severy percent of the time he goes to bat. ~ William Landay

But good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones. ~ William Landay

Predisposition is not predestination. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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 ... ~ William Landay

She did not want to go but understood that I was uneasy, that I felt spotlighted here, that I was not much of a talker to begin with -- chitchat in crowded rooms always left me exhausted -- and these things all had to be weighed. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

The act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty. ~ William Landay

No one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed ~ William Landay

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me. ~ William Landay

Witness: I thought it was a mistake. Based on what we knew at the time, it was a mistake to turn away from Patz as a suspect so early in the investigation. ~ William Landay

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself. ~ William Landay

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it. ~ William Landay

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster. ~ William Landay

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted. ~ William Landay

It turns out, you can get used to almost anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable. ~ William Landay

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk. ~ William Landay

fingers into a beak and flapped it open and shut: talk, talk. "You never know. If you pick him up, he'll just call his lawyer. You might lose your only chance to talk to him." "No, it's better we pick him up. After that, you can sweet-talk him, Duff. That's what you're good at." "You sure?" "We can't have people saying we didn't push hard enough on this guy." The comment was off key, and a doubtful expression crossed Duffy's face. We had always made it a rule not to give a shit how things looked or what people thought. A prosecutor's judgment is supposed to be insulated from politics. "You know what I mean, Paul. This is the first credible ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

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. ~ William Landay

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie. ~ William Landay

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly. ~ William Landay

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob. ~ William Landay

I was greeted at the Magraths' apartment door by a dumpy, pie-faced woman with a frizz of unsprung black hair. She wore black spandex leggings and an oversized T-shirt with an equally oversized message stamped across the front: Don't Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own. This witticism ran six full lines, drawing my eyes southward over her person from wavering bosom to detumescent belly, a journey I regret even now. ~ William Landay

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead. ~ William Landay

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere. ~ William McDonough

The more we do, the more we can do. ~ William Hazlitt

Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write: Charles's friend, Burns's poems, the witch's malice. ... The pronomial possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and ours have no apostrophe. Indefinite pronouns, however, use the apostrophe to show possession: one's rights, somebody else's umbrella. A common error is to write it's for its, or vice versa. The first is a contraction, meaning "it is". The second is a possessive. It's a wise dog that scratches its own fleas. ~ Strunk Jr., William

Deeds, not words shall speak to me. ~ John William Fletcher

They have a plentiful lack of wit. ~ William Shakespeare

The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying. ~ William Greenough Thayer Shedd

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day - doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents - it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents" and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort i ~ William E. Connolly

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner. ~ William Hazlitt

Any damn fool can build homes. What counts is how many you can sell for how little. ~ William Levitt

Wi' basket oft shoo walks abroad To some poor lonely elf; To ivery one shoo knaws t' reight way At's poorer nor(2) herself. Shoo niverr speyks o' what shoo gives, Kind, gentle-hearted sowl; I' charity her hands find wark, Shoo's good alike to all. ~ Frederic William Moorman

America's greatness depends on the ability of its citizens to make the most of their lives. Americans with disabilities are an enormous, often untapped reservoir of that potential. ~ William J. Clinton

Winston Churchill once quipped, "The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." He went on to say, "I am an optimist. It does not seem much use being anything else. ~ William Ury

They that love beyond the world
cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies. ~ William Penn

The time approaches
That will with due decision make us know
What we shall say we have and what we owe.
Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,
But certain issue strokes must arbitrate;
Towards which, advance the war.
They exit marching. ~ William Shakespeare

Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth
one with a long history
is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful disgestion for the rich. ~ William Sloane Coffin Jr.

To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field. ~ William Cowper

A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time... If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. ~ William Zinsser

Sonnet CVII

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. ~ William Shakespeare

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ~ Christopher Hitchens

I am not bound to please thee with my answers. ~ William Shakespeare

John Jones may be described as 'one of the has beens'. ~ William Hone

Be sure that religion cannot be right that a man is the worse for having. ~ William Penn

The Blood of Heroes is surely the best account to date, one that presents plenty of new insights while acting as a corrective-or at least an alternative viewpoint-to previous accounts ... Donovan combines that vital blend of authoritative scholarship with the vivid writing necessary to make an oft-told tale seem fresh. ~ William C. Davis

By right, as the word is employed in this subject, has always been understood discretion, that is, a full and complete power of either doing a thing or omitting it, without the person's becoming liable to animadversion or censure from another, that is, in other words, without his incurring any degree of turpitude or guilt. Now in this sense I affirm that man has no rights, no discretionary power whatever. ~ William Godwin

True repentance has as its constituent elements not only grief and hatred of sin, but also an apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. It hates the sin, and not simply the penalty; and it hates the sin most of all because it has discovered God's love. ~ William Mackergo Taylor

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending. ~ William Monahan

The attention of a traveller, should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur. ~ William Bartram

Don't worry, William. I've seen the future, and this all works out reasonably well...

- From Almost Famous, 2000 ~ Movie Quote

I think I've done every disgusting thing you can in a film. ~ Seann William Scott

Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. ~ William James

I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways. ~ William Shakespeare

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. ~ William Sloane Coffin

The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details. ~ William Hazlitt

Where the world sees trash, Africa recycles. Where the world see junk, Africa sees rebirth. ~ William Kamkwamba

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world. ~ William James

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results. ~ William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs. ~ William Feather

Jane Austen, who is said to be Shakespearian, never reminds us of Shakespeare, I think, in her full-dress portraits, but she does so in characters such as Miss Bates and Mrs. Allen. ~ A. C. Bradley

If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
if not this parting was well made. ~ One William Shakespeare

Science is the storytelling of our time. ~ William Irwin Thompson

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness. ~ William Penn

We all live in a small unique world, that's why we need at least one sole common language. ~ William C. Brown

[L]et light Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring The honey'd dew that cometh on waking day. O radiant morning ... ~ William Blake

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! ~ William Shakespeare