101
" ...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.
This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...
[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. "
― Laura Hillenbrand
102
" (...) there are these fading, ageing girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who have never been loved. Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them. Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses, people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on fading until they are nothing. "
106
" The power of monsters is their ability to fuse opposites, to merge contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinction, and ontological categories. Monsters overcome the barrier of time itself. Uniting past and present, demonic and divine, guilt and conscience, predator and prey, parent and child, self and alien, our monsters are our innermost selves. "
