Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice. — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
“Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age,… — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
“Somewhere in all the bright assurances he was lost in a private darkness, led on by a recurrent dream of more than he was. What means did he have to fulfil it? A family, a house, a patch of garden. Suburban man's estate. With that he had somehow to contain and satisfy a hunger that seemed grotesquely out of keeping… — William McIlvanney Copy Share
That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the… — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives… — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings, or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As… — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be… — William McIlvanney Copy Share Image
