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41 " Men who have not been violated don’t understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.When you don’t have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have told you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them. "
― Rene Denfeld , The Enchanted
42 " The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. "
43 " She thinks how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What is we immortalized the victims? "
44 " I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up. "
45 " Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen--to hear--so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening. "
46 " What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair? "
47 " I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books. "
48 " Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully. "
49 " The guards hate the priest. To them, men like the priest paper the sky with romantic tissue-paper legends, but down here below the earth, in this enchanted place, we know life cannot be contained on a slogan or a prayer tablet. We know that kindness rules with the fist and chains rule with a turn to the sky, that all humans require penance and without it we all seek punishment, over and over again, until the body and mind are satisfied and we die. "
50 " Her courage frightens and amazes me. It make me hopeful for her. Is that what you call love? Is that what you call hope? "
51 " The lady hasn’t lost it yet—the sound of freedom. When she laughs, you can hear the wind in the trees and the splash of water hitting pavement. You can sense the gentle caress of rain on your face and how laughter sounds in the open air, all the things those of us in this dungeon can never feel. "
52 " The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends. "
53 " If death row is a sharp punishment, life without parole can be an endless torture. "
54 " If there are ever times when I would regret the choice York is making, it is times like these, when life feels like another page waiting to get turned. "
55 " she winds her way through gorgeous blue conifer forests, past glistening rivers and curves that give glimpses of heaven. "
56 " Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can’t ’splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump "
57 " I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls. "
58 " The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious. "
59 " [...] and every time she says the word, it breaks her heart into pieces that she has to pick up in her hands and shove back in her chest. "
60 " I hear them, the fallen priest and the lady. Their footsteps sound like the soft hush of rain over the stone floors. "