top of page
"It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Law quotes

"Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone."

"The laws of men are not infallible."

"When they say whatever you say may be used against you, they mean it!"

"The law is logical and is based on common sense. The trick was to argue the law in favor of your particular point of view without sounding biased. It was kind of like a magic trick: the best illusionist being the one who can best manipulate the logic to his or her advantage, all the while giving the illusion of impartiality."

"Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."

"The law. Lady Frances, is an uncertain animal. It has twists and turns that surprise the non-legal mind."

"When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, Rob his children of a father."

"What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death."

"This extraordinary tale of madness, leading up to Stephen being sectioned off to the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, also reveals Stephen's eventual fight to win his freedom from the asylum, which saw his legal team mount a successful challenge against the 'criminally insane' label that was keeping him in Broadmoor. Moyle's legal team successfully argued that he was either a criminal or insane, he could not be both."
Explore more quotes by David Guterson

"Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it."

"At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices."

"I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years."

"When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer."

"The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer."

"I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute."

"Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me."

"Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together."

"When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars."
bottom of page