" Christopher Burney, the British officer who was held in Buchenwald and other German prison camps, was kept in solitary confinement for years during World War II. At first, he told himself he’d be out by Christmas. When Christmas passed, he hoped to be released by Easter. When that, too, passed and summer came, “I dismissed my old impatience from my mind,” he wrote in Solitary Confinement, “seeing such promise in the summer weather that no reservation, with its hidden pessimism, was now necessary…I could be patient for three more months.” That is the way a survivor thinks. When I was working in maximum-security prisons in the early 1980s, I remember one convict telling me, “I could do a nickel standing on my head.” When I asked how he did it, he said, “You got to stay inside yo’ mine.” That’s survivor thinking. "

― Laurence Gonzales , Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why