Sergio De La Pava Quotes & Sayings

I wrote that certain things were leaving me nauseated. I said that judges made me feel that way. Not most of them but all of them. I said that you for example, the judge I'm writing this to, made me feel nauseated. The nausea came from understanding that people produced by every conceivable advantage got to decide whether someone like Jalen lived or died and what was worse was they never fucking seemed to decide that the person should live, that a person's life, any person, was more important than whether some fat fuck at a country club thought you were hard enough on crime or whether you continue to get sufficient reelection campaign contributions you worthless retarded piece of shit. Why should you be allowed to decide anything beyond what you have for lunch you mental infant? — Sergio De La Pava

Undone by your own protective measures. — Sergio De La Pava

There's a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending. — Sergio De La Pava

I'm afraid to move for fear of getting some of the world on me. — Sergio De La Pava

Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain. — Sergio De La Pava

How do we not have money? This is a country of organizations. Everywhere you look people are organizing themselves into groups, one joining many and many morphing into one. They have money, let's have at some of it. — Sergio De La Pava

And I don't give a cow's dick what Hume said, science rules! — Sergio De La Pava

I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands that were making the music when this decision was made simply disappeared and got real jobs, the ones that survived made different music that appealed to more people. The result was that when I listened to that music it felt a bit like travelling to the past or visiting ghosts, and this despite the undeniable fact that a very healthy portion of the music I listened to otherwise was created a far longer time ago, by people long-departed, yet produced no similar feelings. — Sergio De La Pava

What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed-to for this kind of situation? A situation when when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant. — Sergio De La Pava

The real problem is I'm greedy. I want complete, utter, unceasing bliss. But I don't want to fall into it either. If happiness were money I wouldn't want to win the lottery. I want to accomplish it, urn it as John Houseman would say. I want it to be an achievement because I want to be in control of my life. I don't want things to happen to me, I want them to happen because of me. Power I want. I want to feel the way I do when I stretch a new canvas and I want to feel that way all the time. the blank canvas fills me with the power of imminent creation. I'm its god an it always bends to my will and when I'm done I know, inside, that it's markedly better than what almost all of my similarly-engaged others can achieve. That's happiness. — Sergio De La Pava

You will never get a satisfactory answer, no matter how much effort or reason you expend, to these types of questions. You probably can't even hope to acquire even mildly strong evidence either way. You will never know, beyond doubt, in advance, what is going to happen to you when you die. Never! And really why should you care? Why do you give a rat's ass? You're five years old. Don't worry about what happens when you die, worry about what happens when you live for crying out loud! Christ, if I was your age, I'd be out living it up, hitting on chicks, getting drunk, c'mon. You with me kid? — Sergio De La Pava

It's hard to imagine any group of people being held in less esteem than we are by our clients. The overwhelming majority of them feel that we are either bumbling incompetents
after all if we're otherwise why aren't we in private practice making real money?
or, even worse, actively conspiring with the DA against them as evidenced by the fact that we know and appear to act friendly towards a lot of these people who are prosecuting them. — Sergio De La Pava

Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others. — Sergio De La Pava

Appeal. Guy's like you get all excited about the appeal. Don't you see that I view the very existence of an appeal as a disastrous failure? No much worse, a personal affront of the highest order for which I blame you. — Sergio De La Pava

I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box. — Sergio De La Pava

Let us continue to hone and hone the methods by which man hangs his fellow man and be done, once and for all, with any hypocrisy. — Sergio De La Pava

And far away in goddamn L.A. or Madison Avenue is the prick who decided that Skittles would sell more quickly if they promised Jalens they would taste the fucking rainbow which is like a complete fucking impossibility and even if it wasn't who said a rainbow would even taste good you know? — Sergio De La Pava

Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom. — Sergio De La Pava

I know this is going to sound weird but this kind of love is almost too intense. It hurts a bit. It feels almost like loss. — Sergio De La Pava

But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction. And sometimes, especially in Boxing, a twenty four year old can become a man overnight. — Sergio De La Pava

And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wishes, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate's degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers' need for overtime. — Sergio De La Pava

The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on. — Sergio De La Pava

Only the unimaginative fear death when it's oblivion that cuts deepest. — Sergio De La Pava