“The human mind is a powerful thing in many ways, but in others it's endlessly fragile—it takes only a single moment of pure terror to tear a hole in it, like a finger through a cobweb, leaving you forever just a shadow, a half-person.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Like I've said before, so many times before, I'm not a good person, I'm not a hero. I'm a criminal, a liar, a cheat, a killer. It was them or me and I wanted to live.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Let's make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Better to be a spirit with the earth beneath you than a corpse pinned tight by the weight of the world.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“But nobody can run from their own demons.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“I pushed until I felt his [Donovan's] body grow still, the tendons in his neck relaxing. I pushed until I felt the mouth beneath the pillow droop, one last dull groan fading into silence. And I kept pushing, because I couldn't bear to pull the pillow away to see what I'd done.
"You're free," I said. I closed my eyes, saw Donovan as he had been. One last smile, then he faded.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“I wondered how many voices there were living in my head, and how they could all have such different opinions.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“All it needed was me, and my fear. Because alone in the silence, in the unfathomable darkness, I knew that my own thoughts would drive me mad. My own mind would kill me.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“When every link to the outside world is severed, time has no meaning. It ceases to exist other than as a dull memory, a vague recollection of what a minute used to be, an hour, a day. Sealed up tight so far beneath the ground, every single second was stretched out almost to infinity—each one a vast and empty abyss where time used to reign, an ageless aeon barren of significance and consequence.
When every scrap of light and sound has been taken away, reality has no meaning. It too ceases to exist, for what is reality other than the cumulation of senses—images witnessed by our own eyes and the noises that enter through our ears? But when all those senses are starved, then the real world fades away like the last frantic gasp of a television program when the set is switched off.
And when reality goes, sanity has no reason. How can your ability to behave in a normal and rational way still exist when nothing normal or rational remains? As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we are separated from the physical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“There was only Furnace. It was our world, our grave, our hell.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“I could accept my life ending, because there would be no more fear and no more pain. But what if death wasn´t the end? What if some part of me, my soul perhaps, lived on?”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Don't give in, Alex, don't let them win. You beat them once and you can do it again. Don't let this place break you. Keep your mind busy, keep yourself occupied, find things to do. If you're doing things, then you still exist, right?”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Keep your mind busy, keep yourself occupied, find things to do. If you're doing things, then you still exist, right?”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“And when reality goes, sanity has no reason.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“Yeah, because you'll really be showing them, won't you. Talk about cutting up your wrists to spite your fate.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
“With every movement the claustrophobia threatened to consume me, and several times I had to stop as the fear rang bells in my brain, making my entire body convulse.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, quote from Solitary
Alexander Gordon Smith
Born place: in Norwich, The United Kingdom
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“Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from The Thing Around Your Neck
“Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly," I said. "So why won't the radio play?"
"I don't know," he said. "Try connecting them here."
He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled "AC," and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance.
"Keep pedaling," he said. "That's it, just keep pedaling."
"Hey, I want to dance, too."
"You'll have to wait your turn."
Without realizing it, I'd just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn't know what this meant until much later.
After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, "What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?”
― William Kamkwamba, quote from The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
“The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist.”
― Lawrence Wright, quote from Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
“Being the object of a woman-hunt, exiled to Simpson, being terrorized by school kids trick-or-treating, lusting after an aroused non-talker with superb thighs. It was all too much.”
― Lisa Marie Rice, quote from Woman on the Run
“Our eyes met, and the look in his took my breath away. I’d seen Nikolas angry plenty of times, but that was nothing compared to the unbridled fury I saw in him now. I knew Nikolas the man, but it was the demon warrior who stood before me, and the demon was raging.”
― Karen Lynch, quote from Relentless
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