Home > Author > William Landay
1 " We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward. "
― William Landay , Mission Flats
2 " 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. "
3 " So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob. "
― William Landay , Defending Jacob
4 " 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. "
5 " I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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 , The Strangler
8 " 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. "
9 " Don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. The hell with 'em. You can't worry about it. "
10 " A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. "
11 " 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.... "
12 " 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. "
13 " At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead. "
14 " The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever. "
15 " 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. "
16 " Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you "
17 " no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed "
18 " Predisposition is not predestination. "
19 " the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty. "
20 " ...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. "
