Life & Mortality Quote by Scott Turow

Turow’s line snaps a highbrow reference onto a lowbrow setting like a police tag on a toe: Shakespeare isn’t just for courts and castles; he’s for sidewalks, alleys, and the kind of ordinary people whose catastrophes don’t get soliloquies. The comparison does two things at once. It elevates street-level tragedy to the status of classic drama, and it undercuts our habit of treating “the streets” as a separate moral universe where death is expected and love is optional.

The key phrase is “almost as often.” It’s a novelist’s hedge that doubles as a dare. Shakespeare is the cultural shorthand for love curdling into fatality, but Turow suggests the real world competes on volume. That’s not poetic exaggeration so much as a grim comment on social conditions: in places where security is thin, rejection can’t stay private. Unrequited love becomes a public humiliation, a trigger, a rumor, a motive. Death follows not because the feeling is rare, but because the systems that contain it - distance, therapy, stable income, reliable policing, community trust - are fragile or absent.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to readers who consume crime stories as genre entertainment. By invoking Shakespeare, Turow implies these deaths aren’t merely plot mechanics; they’re recognizably human, even canonical. The street isn’t an “other” world. It’s our Elizabethan stage with worse lighting and fewer exits.