Quotes from William Landay

I have an idea that this 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. Laurie

Our villains always disappoint us. They never look the part.

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.

But it is hard to say no to my brother, whose invitations feel like commands. He says You wanna play golf? with the same presumption that a rich man says to his driver Will you bring the car around?

We were too sick of the case to talk about it anymore but too obsessed with it to talk about anything else.

They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know "beyond a reasonable doubt" who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

she was one of those selective, ferociously loyal people who, once they have taken you in, will stand by you through the most desperate times. Such people have few acquaintances and many friends. They withhold their affection because it costs them so much to give it so completely, and because they never—ever—revoke it. If you are lucky, you may meet one or two of them in your life.

Omnia mea mecum porto, all that is mine I carry with me.

For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right—that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking, and in Jacob's case I was.

Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters.

Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to "act like a man.

You can't do it alone, that's the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you're going through.

This"—she pinched the skin of her own arm and pulled up a sample of her own flesh—"the human body is a machine. It is a system, a very complex system made of molecules and driven by chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Our minds are part of that system.

The iPod was a leak. It was a danger. I brought it down to the basement and laid it on my little worktable, glass side up, and I got a hammer and smashed it.

Well," he said, "it's a very circumstantial case. There's the thumbprint,

understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them.

keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

Ricky's genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache—had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

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.

the sky, settling in

Her left hand dangled from the armrest, her long fingers and beautiful clear nails. She always had lovely, elegant hands; my own mother's fat-fingered scrubwoman hands looked like dog's paws beside Laurie's. I reached across to take her hand, lacing my fingers in hers so that our two hands made one fist. The sight of her hand in mine made me briefly sentimental. I gave her an encouraging look and jostled our knotted hands.