Top 64 William Landay Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.
William Landay
#4. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,
William Landay
#5. I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.
William Landay
#6. So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.
William Landay
#7. I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.
William Landay
#8. 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
#10. Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.
William Landay
#11. Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.
William Landay
#12. School isn't supposed to be dangerous. It's not a place they should be afraid of. It's their second home. It's where they spend most of their waking hours.
William Landay
#13. We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.
William Landay
#14. 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.
William Landay
#15. Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.
William Landay
#16. No one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed
William Landay
#17. One worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed - but after all, we were children.
William Landay
#18. 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
#19. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.
William Landay
#20. When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.
William Landay
#21. There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.
William Landay
#22. 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
#23. Nobody gets to you without going through me - and nobody's getting through me.
William Landay
#24. Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you - and it will find you
William Landay
#26. 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.
William Landay
#27. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest - the vast majority, tens of thousands of days - are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous.
William Landay
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. There are many more ways to be attractive than to be beautiful.
William Landay
#31. 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
#32. It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly.
William Landay
#33. You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
William Landay
#34. 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.
William Landay
#35. 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
#36. A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.
William Landay
#37. 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.
William Landay
#39. At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.
William Landay
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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.
William Landay
#43. 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
#44. The interior of a teenager's mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.
William Landay
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.
William Landay
#48. A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.
William Landay
#49. 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
#50. Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.
William Landay
#51. But good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.
William Landay
#53. 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
#54. 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.
William Landay
#55. 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
#56. We're not arguing. We're discussing." "You're a lawyer; you don't know the difference. I'm arguing.
William Landay
#57. We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.
William Landay
#58. 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
#59. Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.
William Landay
#61. The act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.
William Landay
#62. 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
#63. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.
William Landay
#64. 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
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