Richard North Patterson > Quotes

“The rulings of the past do not always apply in the present.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Final Judgment

“If someone really interests you, you'll learn about them yourself.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Lasko Tangent

“The only judgment that truly matters is the final judgment.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Final Judgment

“he knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives”
― Richard North Patterson, The Spire

“Are you a consumer or producer?”
― Richard North Patterson, Protect and Defend

“There are some things he doesn't want to know about himself, and others he doesn't want anybody else to know. Which makes him like the rest of us. ...
There are moments in the lives of others that excite both our disgust and our shame, the fear of what we ourselves might do. ...
I venture to say that everyone on this jury, and everyone in this room, has done things that they're ashamed of, and told lies that they regret.”
― Richard North Patterson, Silent Witness

“The thing about being dead, Mr. Lehman, is that there's no future in it.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Lasko Tangent

“My life in politics has taught me that the only thing more difficult than fighting against our enemies is taking questions from my friends.” Amid knowing chuckles, he promised, “Nonetheless, I shall do my best.”
― Richard North Patterson, Exile

“labeled, “high school for the rich and vapid.” “‘If you want a friend,’ he admonished me, ‘don’t choose the insecure, the envious, or the needy. They’re the ones who will sell you out. Those you can trust are confident and secure, men and women who like their lives, and don’t have to meet their needs at your expense. So no gossips, back stabbers, or celebrity fuckers. No one who has to tell you who they know, what they own, how important they are, or whose self-concept depends on the acceptance of others. The only people who can truly care about you are those who are sufficient unto themselves.”
― Richard North Patterson, Eden in Winter

“This country needs a leader, not a pollster; a healer, not a wheeler-dealer; a conscience-raiser, not a fund-raiser.”
― Richard North Patterson, No Safe Place

“All of us know that every assassination of an American President was committed with a gun. All of us then living remember our ineradicable grief when John F. Kennedy was murdered. But all too few of us know that since that awful day more Americans have died from gunshot wounds than died in all the wars of the twentieth century, the bloodiest hundred years in world history . . .”
― Richard North Patterson, Balance of Power

“If you can’t stop time, make it vanish.”
― Richard North Patterson, Trial

“A torpid sun seeped through a haze of humidity”
― Richard North Patterson, The Lasko Tangent

“We have to prove that Rennell Price’s trial lawyer was so incompetent that his client was denied the effective assistance of counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment. It won’t be easy, given that some courts have ruled that even sleeping through your client’s trial is not enough to qualify.”
― Richard North Patterson, Conviction

“Robinson could do with three or four facts what prehistorians achieved with stray dinosaur bones:”
― Richard North Patterson, The Lasko Tangent

“morning light through his windshield was pale and tired; the city had the desultory, cluttered look of a living room after a drunken party; Martin”
― Richard North Patterson, Escape the Night

“He gazed at the table. “After Vietnam,” he said at length, “I wasn’t always present. That was hard, particularly on your mother. Yet there was no way out but forward. After a while, the past recedes.” Meg was surprised; for her father to mention Mary McCarran was even rarer than his allusions to Vietnam.”
― Richard North Patterson, In The Name Of Honor

“Writing seems like the only job where what you think and feel really matters.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Final Judgment

“A whore in a Dumpster. Nat says her throat’s cut.”
― Richard North Patterson, Dark Lady: A Novel

“like”
― Richard North Patterson, The Lasko Tangent

“The next morning the squalid weather”
― Richard North Patterson, In The Name Of Honor

“You can't supply some other adult with something they don't have. Any more than you can sustain a relationship by offering up your sense of yourself as a kind of bribe. In the end, everyone loses.”
― Richard North Patterson, Degree of Guilt

“To want any one thing too much is barbaric.”
― Richard North Patterson, No Safe Place

“Chicago,” Bright answered sardonically, “is not just a place. It’s a state of mind.”
― Richard North Patterson, Dark Lady: A Novel

“But for a good while the CIA interpreted that law to exclude disclosure of the fact that its payroll included five associates of Adolf Eichmann, who planned Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews.”
― Richard North Patterson, Exile

“the awareness of a community that indifference, as well as injustice, was their enemy.”
― Richard North Patterson, Trial

“What she was hearing, Caroline knew, was a lifetime of frustration and moral passion, based on a single, diamond-hard belief: that the death penalty was tainted by human failings too profound to cure, and that imposing it was an act of arrogance which diminished our humanity.”
― Richard North Patterson, Conviction

“They bombed civilians, Father. Thousands of them, and for what? To save face in a war we’ll never win and now don’t even plan to win. Because human beings are only pieces on their geopolitical chessboard.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Final Judgment

“The federal government practiced redlining—disqualifying Black neighborhoods for mortgages backed by the government. It would only ensure property covered by restrictive covenants. It cut off Black areas by building highways around them, which made it easier for white people to run away to the suburbs. The neighborhoods left behind have a fraction of white wealth and an oversupply of substandard housing, ill health, infant mortality, and lousy schools.”
― Richard North Patterson, Trial

“Hell, with money you can even get away with being liberal. But if you’re poor and liberal, people just think you’re peculiar. Oh, they’ll never be sure whether you’re a liberal because you’re poor or poor because you’re a liberal, but they’re damn sure it’s one or the other.”
― Richard North Patterson, The Outside Man