Blood Will Out Quotes

“Liars are exhausting people.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ...

He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature.

I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women to come--convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you’re lost now.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Behind the building rose towering, aged pine trees whose shadows fell crabbed and arthritic across the lawn. The lawn was expansive and in good, green shape. It offered contrast. It was like a fresh haircut on a drunken tramp.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Now I was learning something new; how being deceived, and not wishing to admit it, could proliferate into a kind of madness too. The revelations came swiftly after that, but none of them staggered me as the first ones had. The”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“One reason the Internet fosters conspiracy theories is that its system of branching, crossing tunnels is shaped like paranoid reasoning itself, and once inside the shadow maze you find yourself tracking elusive glimmers of light that recede as fast as you can follow them.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“talk,”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Who were all these people, so many of them so brown? What was this ritual unfolding around him? I've never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like small blue coins behind his glasses.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“epistemological”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“people, including types that I didn’t like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Sometimes I wondered if my problem was liking too many different kinds of”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Purple Noon.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers’ houses.”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“Philippe,”
― Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade