17 Quotes by Jill Leovy

This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.

Paul Williams and reflected his deepest values – California living and “a passion for small homes for everyday people” – according to his Memphis archivist, Deborah Brackstone.

If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs’s ceaseless vigor and determination – investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people – conditions would have been different.

The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.

She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn’t know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job.

There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life’s paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. has a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.

Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them.

The hurt was too great for crying – tears belonged to a realm of earthly physics, but the murder of her son had transcended the coordinates of her world.