Quotes from Richard North Patterson

If someone really interests you, you'll learn about them yourself.

The only judgment that truly matters is the final judgment.

Are you a consumer or producer?

he knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives

There are some things he doesn't want to know about himself, and others he doesn't want anybody else to know. Which makes him like the rest of us. ... There are moments in the lives of others that excite both our disgust and our shame, the fear of what we ourselves might do. ... I venture to say that everyone on this jury, and everyone in this room, has done things that they're ashamed of, and told lies that they regret.

My life in politics has taught me that the only thing more difficult than fighting against our enemies is taking questions from my friends." Amid knowing chuckles, he promised, "Nonetheless, I shall do my best.

The impostor syndrome. I know it well. Inside every self-assured professional lives a frightened neurotic who prays that he can somehow succeed before his clients discover the fraud. It's the guilty secret that drives us all.

You can't supply some other adult with something they don't have. Any more than you can sustain a relationship by offering up your sense of yourself as a kind of bribe. In the end, everyone loses.

In his nearly twenty-five years as Chief Justice, Roger Bannon never once voted to overturn a death sentence. But what truly distinguished him was a driving lack of curiosity as to whether any of these defendants were, in fact, innocent.

The thing about being dead, Mr. Lehman, is that there's no future in it.

There'll be people better and smarter than you, Adam. There always are. Your strength must be to want it more, and let nothing get in the way. They called Robert Kennedy ruthless. But for a few months before he died, when I joined his campaign, I knew Bobby very well, and I can tell you he was most ruthless with himself. That's how you should be.

the awareness of a community that indifference, as well as injustice, was their enemy.

It won't be easy, given that some courts have ruled that even sleeping through your client's trial is not enough to qualify.

We have to prove that Rennell Price's trial lawyer was so incompetent that his client was denied the effective assistance of counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment. It won't be easy, given that some courts have ruled that even sleeping through your client's trial is not enough to qualify.

He gazed at the table. "After Vietnam," he said at length, "I wasn't always present. That was hard, particularly on your mother. Yet there was no way out but forward. After a while, the past recedes." Meg was surprised; for her father to mention Mary McCarran was even rarer than his allusions to Vietnam.

What she was hearing, Caroline knew, was a lifetime of frustration and moral passion, based on a single, diamond-hard belief: that the death penalty was tainted by human failings too profound to cure, and that imposing it was an act of arrogance which diminished our humanity.

Yup, I think it's in the Virgins.

child, he had learned the gift of watchful silence.

Chicago," Bright answered sardonically, "is not just a place. It's a state of mind.

He was no longer that boy; she was no longer that girl. But both still lived within them, she understood, and they were meeting again, deepened by all that had happened to them since, the realization of all they had missed.

To want any one thing too much is barbaric.

his legacy, if there is one, is that I try to do my best to see people whole, for who they are and what they've been through. especially those who matters to me

The notion that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights so that racists and sociopaths and madmen could slaughter innocent men, women, and children with assault weapons or handguns is one of the most contemptible notions that an irresponsible minority has ever crammed down the throats of its potential victims.

This country needs a leader, not a pollster; a healer, not a wheeler-dealer; a conscience-raiser, not a fund-raiser.