Joseph Arellano

“Perhaps there was something buried in this memoir that I kept missing, something that I kept searching for in vain. It may be buried somewhere . . .”

“. . . the literary equivalent of a bridge too far.”

It may be a shame that Marcia Clark spent so many years as a prosecutor for the County of Los Angeles.

“See, we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much.”

When she turned seventy-nine she wrote to tell me that although she was now legally blind she had decided to study medicine: “I am thinking of going to nursing school . . .

“Killing two bad guys, taking a cold-blooded murderer home. Not bad for a few days in Seattle, huh?”

“I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories . . .”

“I could always heal the birds,” he admits. . . . Echo takes his hand, “Joseph says that birds are the only creatures that have blind faith. This is why they are able to fly.”

“[Elliot was] a muscular populist liberal who wasn’t afraid to confront business institutions by punching them in the nose.

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”

"There were times . . . when Kelly felt desperate, confused and shattered. But she also felt embraced and loved. And that sustained her.”

“Mario’s case was my personal salvation . . .”

“On the one hand, there was the logic of the law, the science of criminology, the processes of adjudication. On the other, there was pain, murderous rage, death.”

“The heart asks pleasure first, and then excuse from pain.”
—Emily Dickinson

“God, if He was anything, was the answer to the mystery of why you got sick. . . .”
—Joshua Ferris

Annabelle McKay is a student at U.C. Santa Barbara when she meets her future husband, Grant, at a students’ apartment eviction party in Isla Vista.

“Better bring your own redemption when you come/
To the barricades of Heaven where I’m from . . .”
—Jackson Browne

“A work of fiction is an excellent place for a confession.”

“Tracing our steps from the beginning / Until they vanished into the air / Trying to understand how our lives had led us there.”
—Jackson Browne

“Maybe he realized . . . the utter aloneness of the fighter—despite the hangers-on, the crowds, the adulation, it was a pitiless profession.”

“He is the beginning and the end of music in America.”
—Bing Crosby on Louis Armstrong

“Cancel my subscription to the resurrection/
Send my credentials to the house of detention/
I got some friends inside.”
—The Doors (“When the Music’s Over”)

“Every writer is alone . . .”

“. . . the lonely were more likely to have died than the nonlonely.”

No one writes better courtroom dramas than Scott Turow. In Presumed Innocent, he told us the story of chief deputy District Attorney Rusty Sabich.

“I try to write the books I would love to come upon. . . .”
—Anne Lamott

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
— Rumi

“The person I used to be could have only made one choice; the grown-up (me) might have made a different one. That was how life was. You only figured out the right thing after you were old.”

Jason weighed the situation for a moment, and then decided to risk jumping out of character. “Pisa isn’t in the game,” he typed. Very quickly, the voice responded. “This isn’t a game.”

“Most of our fears are petty and small. . . . 

“Even in the suit, (Judge) Hubbard’s thick neck and big glasses gave him the air of a character actor playing a bit part on a low-budget cable movie.  Jesse Jackson kicked into gear with kisses, so

“The byproduct of suffering, if you’re lucky, is appreciation. . . .
My windfall has always been a sweet tooth, the gold watch that
deflected the bullet aimed straight at my heart.”

“The memory was like an explosion and he was inside it, living through it and it surrounded him and slowly he breathed life into it. . . . This was where he was headed. He was entering someplace.