The Fact Of A Body: A Murder And A Memoir Quotes
"The woods are the dense, deciduous, swampy kind, the kind in which rotting leaves mingle with the earth and the ground gives soft way beneath the boy’s feet."
"It’s a strange night, Jeremy gone, all the neighbors out and looking, a night outside time."
"But the watching changes something in him, and from this point on it is as if he is in a dream."
"The house’s long corridors—perfect for playing catch—make the house seem grand."
"The silence works like that. It’s not fragile. It shields the glittering moments and the confusing ones, too."
"I’m cold, too," my baby sister, Elize, says."
"The air is thick with unspoken words already, I am all full up with my own secret."
"He knew it was impossible, but sitting in his bedroom, knowing the boy was in the closet, he kept thinking he heard breathing."
"That’s the feeling that must come back to Ricky now, in the cruiser, the clear bright winter sun beating through the windows, the inside of the car heating up."
"Funny where the mind wants to lodge. Funny where it wants to think it can make a difference."
"It’s not a question, but he looks at Ricky anyway."
"It’s an odd moment to thorn into him, an odd moment for him to come back to."
"You have a good day," she says firmly. Then she walks back to the house, carrying the baby in her arms."
"The year is 1964, and twenty-four-year-old Alcide Langley, the man who will be Ricky’s father, steers a station wagon along a highway in Red Rock, Arizona."
"He feels that new smell like a clot of earth in his throat."
"She’s been on every drug they can give her, many not intended for pregnant women."
"He feels the weight of my grandfather’s hand in his."
"The family meeting around the Formica kitchen table."
"I like roses and images of guns and guitars."
"You can bet if one of his sisters had taken the car, they’d have believed his sister."
"I’ve been thinking about dying or getting someone else to kill me."
"I see him huddled under the station overhang."
"I got very attached to him. Like he was my own son."
"He’s so proud of his polo shirt and assigned cap you’d think it was a military uniform."
"It’s like dancing, the way I wrangle the past that night."
"Consistency is what we prize, and coherency, and reason."
"I have no illusions that all my clients will be innocent."
"My father’s a criminal defense attorney. I grew up around his clients."
"Some of them may be charged with other crimes in addition to murder."
"I believe in what your firm does. I’ve always opposed the death penalty. I’d like to help fight it."
"Yes," I say. "I can defend a child molester."
"That child can’t come back to me, but I can go back to him."
"I couldn’t bury him in a suit. He likes his jeans and his sneakers."
"I am here today, Your Honor, to ask your mercy for Ricky Langley’s life."
"I think a pedophile was what he knew he was now, what he’d always be, and because that’s who he was he wanted to make that identity bigger. He didn’t have anything else to be."
"But the determination to turn away from the past isn’t benign."
"The morning after the Christmas party when I overheard my father telling people that I was writing about something that only I recalled, I confronted him."
"I have changed my sister’s name in this book, out of respect for her choice."
"The road into Hebert Cemetery is long and winding, made of packed dirt that cuts between tall leafy trees that blot out the sun."
"I stood in front of the cabinet mirror and studied my brown curly hair. I studied my green eyes. I looked at myself, looking for her."
"I recognize the feeling. My body recognized the feeling of pain inside me."
"There are reasons for that, good ones. The trial was about the murder, not the whole story. But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation?"
"And I hear you’ve been asking your mother some questions."
"I am trying to chase down the origin of this story because I can’t find the origin in my own life."
"The prosecution implied many times that Ricky had molested Jeremy, even accused him of it—but they could present little of the circumstantial evidence that he might have."
"The caretaker has stopped walking and is watching me, waiting for me to answer his question."
"When I was lonely as a child I would sometimes go to the small bathroom right off the kitchen."
"Is it coincidence or is it evidence of Ricky’s mental illness how similar these two pictures look?"
"Pedophilia is a disease. But pedophilia doesn’t rob a person of their ability to make a decision between what is right and wrong."
"What’s wrong with him? Unfortunately, what’s happened is that Ricky can’t deal with it."
"Of everything Ricky has heard in this trial, the semen is what finally sets him off. This evidence of who he is."
"The jury never hears about Ricky’s prior convictions... They never hear about the classes he took in the Georgia prison; his struggles to understand religion and reconcile it with his life."
"No one story is simple. No one story complete."
"What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause."
"Meet the boys," I say. What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated."
"I have to go now," I say again, and I hear how my voice has risen in pitch. "I am saying this as much to myself as to them, I am trying to get myself to go."