At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case and the Oppenheimer hearings; certainly one saw it in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder.