Edward Humes · 400 pages
Rating: (696 votes)
“we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Take a trip in my mind
see all that I've seen,
and you'd be called a
beast, not a human being...
Fuck it, cause there's
not much I can do,
there's no way out, my
screams have no voice no
matter how loud I shout...
I could be called a
low life, but life ain't
as low as me. I'm
in juvenile hall headed
for the penitentiary.
George Trevino, sixteen, "Who Am I?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“from a child in danger to a dangerous child”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“You want what you can’t have. I see it in your eyes. The
pain that fills your nights is because of my pack of lies. I’ve
opened up the door for you to walk away. There’s a better
path for you even though I want you to stay. I’ve broken the
rules, I’ve veered from the path but when I met you I knew
to save you was worth the wrath. Let me leave now before
it’s too late. Let me leave now before you know what I am
and your love becomes hate.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Existence
“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Beyond Good and Evil
“The night's chilly breath tickles up my neck and finds my ear, whispering secrets only the wind knows.”
― Libba Bray, quote from The Sweet Far Thing
“You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.”
― Augustine of Hippo, quote from Confessions
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales
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