Presumed Innocent Quotes

“me”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“I understood more of my father’s life then, and how his deprivations, in that odd heredity of material effects, had become my own—I recognized more of that in a moment than in all the time before. And I was overcome by grief.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“After all these weeks, after all of this, I feel that I am finally going to pieces, and I find, stunningly, that as I turn about in the street, I am praying, a habit of my childhood, when I would try to cover my bets with a God in whom I knew I did not much believe.
And now, dear God, I think, dear God in whom I do not believe, I pray you to stop this, for I am deathly frightened. Dear God, I smell my fear, with an oder as distinct as ozone on the air after a lightening flash. I feel fear so palpable it has a color, an oozing fiery red, and I feel it pitifully in my bones, which ache. My pain is so extreme that I can barely move down this hot avenue, and for a moment cannot, as my backbone bows with fear, as if a smelted rod, red-hot and livid, had been laid there. Dear God, dear God, I am in agony and fear, and whatever I may have done to make you bring this down upon me, release me, please, I pray, release me. Release me. Dear God in whom I do not believe, dear God, let me go free.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“It is a given of the criminal justice system, an axiom as certain as the laws of gravity, that defendants rarely tell the truth. Cops and prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges- everybody knows they lie. They lie solemnly; with sweaty palms and shifty eyes; or, more often, with a look of schoolboy innocence and an increased disbelief when their credulty is assailed. They lie to protect themselves; they lie to protect their friends. They lie for the fun of it, or because that is the way they have always been. They lie about big details and small ones, about who started it, who thought of it, who did it and who was sorry. But they lie. It is the defendant's credo. Lie to the cops. Lie to your lawyer. Lie to the jury that tries your case. If convicted, lie to your probation officer. Lie to your bunkmate in the pen. Trumpet your innocence. Let the dirty bastards out there with a grain of doubt. Something can always change.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“TV and the movies have spoiled the most intimate moments of our lives. They have given us conventions which dominante our expectations in instants whose intensity would ordinarily make them spontaneous and unique. We have conventions of grief,which we learned from the Kennedys, and ordained gestures for victory by which we imitate the atheletes we see on the tube, who in turn have learned the same things from other jocks they saw on TV. Seduction, too, has got its standards now, its slow-eyed moments, its breathless repartee, and in an instance such as this we end up coming on smooth and wry and bravely composed, like all those gorgeous, poised movietime couples probably because we have no other idea of how to behave.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

“openly desirous of my company, so alight with manifest appreciation of every angle of my being.”
― Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent