The Enchanted Quotes
"This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it but I do."
"The most wonderful enchanted things happen here—the most enchanted things you can imagine."
"Inside, the lies you tell become the person you become."
"Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place."
"Sometimes, when reading a book, I would think of the other people who might have touched it before it was donated."
"In my mind, the words sound right. They chase each other around like boats on a lake after dusk."
"The books helped me see that truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you."
"It is amazing what we hear down here in the dungeon."
"I could see the reason for the name. How the baseball diamond glowed to where I could see the reason for the name."
"The outside is too big and scary for me to think about anymore."
"No, the dream of the death row client is to escape execution for a life behind bars."
"What the lady doesn’t know is the fever that follows finding poison."
"Every day he protects inmates from one another and society from the inmates."
"Enough years of being the jailer—and he knows that some men deserve to die."
"Yet she still tries to get them off, and this he cannot figure."
"He will go into the bedroom they have shared for twenty-two years, listening carefully for the tiny gasps of pain that will tell him what number she is today."
"The older, con-wise men on the prison bus look at the white-haired boy. Some look with sadness, others with appraisal."
"The bus bumps down the prison road, under the watchtowers. The gates are slowly raised, and the bus pulls inside."
"The new men are quickly herded into a prison door. WELCOME TO THE STAT PRISON says a sign on the wall."
"You came to prison as punishment, not for punishment," the guard at the head of the room tells them. "Make the most of it."
"What matters in prison is not who you are but what you want to become. This is the place of true imagination."
"They dine in their cells on meals that would be unthinkable for the rest of us—gourmet concoctions made of the food sold in the prison commissary."
"There are prisons inside prisons, walls inside walls, and in this place you learn that your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows."
"Once in such a time, I slit my wrists with my teeth and rubbed my wrists on the walls like some crazy Manson killer."
"I pretend it is rain I hear, crying down the gutters, and not the wet slap of flesh or the dark laughter in the cells of the Hall of Lifers far above me."
"She explains who she is as she walks inside, but he doesn’t appear concerned."
"The sweet smell gets stronger as they zigzag down circuitous paths and scramble over logs set across dry creek beds."
"The little men with hammers sit back on their haunches deep in the walls and listen, chattering in happy gossip with one another."
"I sit in my cell and remember the psychiatrist I saw back when I was a kid, when they sent me to the mental hospital."
"The burning bodies make hissing and popping sounds. When the heads explode from the trapped steam, they make a particularly gruesome sound."
"The oven heats to 1800 degrees, but it is old and cranky. It takes between three and five hours to burn the bodies."
"I dive for the book. Only when back on my cot do I look to see what it is. Oh, joy. The trusty wasn’t lying."
"The golden horses are going to run. They always seem to run around the time of an execution."
"The best part? Conroy will get written up with an official commendation for busting the inmate."
"Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them."
"The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning."
"Even in the dungeon, I cover my head with my blanket. Whether heaven or whether hell, I will never escape who I am."
"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."
"You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won’t leave."
"With every exhalation, I find a way out of this enchanted place."
"I remember how the warden found me there, crying on the stairs, absently wiping blood all over my face as I wept."
"It is holding a man’s head in your hands as his eyes flutter and die."
"How many other thoughts—good thoughts—could have come to you instead, she thinks."
"It’s okay, she wants to tell it, as if the folder is York and York is not dead."
"You can wish that now, she tells herself. It doesn’t undo what they have done."
"I’m bringing you to a safe place, York, she thinks. The place you always needed—a safe place to dream. To hope."
"She thinks she might burst out crying—but she doesn’t."
"I saw you, York. I knew you—who you really were and what you truly wanted."
""I would have washed them for you," she says."
"Go, lady. Go to him now. Please—let him know you."
"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."
"She is murmuring something, a word that sounds like the most precious word of all, after someone’s name, and that word is the same as the one I wrote to her on the inside of my book: Love."