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121 " I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I'd never heard against my brain cavity. "
― Piper Kerman , Orange Is the New Black
122 " If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong, good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. "
123 " Memoirs are often about difficult things in a person's life. In my situation, my story starts with about the stupidest, most immoral thing I've ever done, one with terrible consequences. "
124 " A warm, squirming lapful of golden puppy, licking and biting and unabashedly happy, made despair dissolve no matter how hard you were hanging on to it. "
125 " I guess trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness. "
126 " A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more. "
127 " Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime - certainly my own - yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society. "
― Piper Kerman
128 " I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others. "
129 " According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin or coffin nails, you be the judge. "
130 " Maybe if her mother had been put in treatment for her addictions (which were implicit) rather than in the garage in Danbury, Pom-Pom wouldn't be standing in his office today. "
131 " The advice I got from many quarters was ‘do your time, don’t let the time do you. "
132 " I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know. "
133 " Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. But how to reconcile it with one's insatiable need for other people? "
134 " when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, "
135 " Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed - they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. "
136 " our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. "
137 " How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent? "
138 " box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too, "
139 " If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong, good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot. It "
140 " A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always. "