"Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books."

i've started dogearing the books i read, and writing down my favorite lines. these are some of the bits i liked most...

All the prisoners here are indistinguishable from civilians; the government does not have the money to provide them with the prisoners’ uniforms. I asked on guard if the prisoners were ever tempted to escape, given that, once they did, they would look like any other man in the street. Escape? he looked at me with genuine incredulity. Here, he said, they get a bowl of soup. Out there they would be dying of hunger like everyone else. The prisoners, he stressed, are our enemies - that is true. But they are not idiots.

-Ryszard Kapuscinski

Strangely, despite being a physician (or because of it), I think I would want no drugs. I would want perfect clarity of sound and sight. I have a vision of three men, of how, as they stood on the truck playform with the nooses around their necks, they must have had that perfect clarity. They would have seen the mob not as a mob but as individual faces: yound men, old men, bearded men, a efw women. They would have felt fingers tugging and pulling at their shoelaces like naughty puppies do. They felt the rope resting slack on their necks, its implied contract, a synmbolic boundary between body and mind. They heard the truck’s engine idling, felt the vibration transmitted through their proprioreceptors and up the spinal cord and to their sensory cortex even as they sensed their bladder and bowels give way. They heard the rise in the pitch of the truck engine, felt the jold of the gear engaging, saw the crowd’s excitement peak, felt the absolute clarity of sight and sound that precedes the maelstrom.

-Abraham Berghese