20 quotes
"Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous."
A Certain Justice (1997)
"You need to decide what you're interested in."
A Certain Justice (1997)
Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?
A Certain Justice (1997)
Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect.
A Certain Justice (1997)
What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut.
A Certain Justice (1997)
He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous.
A Certain Justice (1997)
No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows.
A Certain Justice (1997)
If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her?
A Certain Justice (1997)
"I was glad to give up teaching, at least in London, glad to be rid of noise and violence and staff-room politics, and the constant fight to keep order."
A Certain Justice (1997)
She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire.
A Certain Justice (1997)
The street and the houses had a perfection which was almost intimidating. No weed, thought Kate, would surely dare to push its unsanctified tendrils through these carefully tended small lawns and flower beds.
A Certain Justice (1997)
They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?
A Certain Justice (1997)
How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos.
A Certain Justice (1997)
A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition.
A Certain Justice (1997)
His face was a mask betraying nothing.
A Certain Justice (1997)
Mrs Buckley was revealed as a slight, nervous-looking woman with a small precisely formed mouth between bulging cheeks, which gave her the appearance of a hamster.
A Certain Justice (1997)
But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis.
A Certain Justice (1997)
He looked more like a professional rugger player than a lawyer, though not when he wore his wig. Then the face became an impressive mask of judicial gravitas. But, thought Langton, wigs metamorphose us all; perhaps that's why we're so unwilling to get rid of them.
A Certain Justice (1997)
"...We have a reputation for being difficult. Chambers is a collection of intelligent, highly independent, idiosyncratic, critical and overworked men and women whose profession is argument. It's a dull set which doesn't contain its share of eccentrics and personalities who could be described as difficult. ..."
A Certain Justice (1997)
How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being.
A Certain Justice (1997)