Alexander Gordon Smith > Quotes

“Don't make the mistake of bringing your heart down here with you, there is no place for it in Furnace.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“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, Solitary

“When you're locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“You don't have friends in here, you'll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you'll just lose them. They'll get shanked or they'll jump or they'll be taken one night.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“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, Solitary

“Nobody cares. You shouldn't either.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“There always has to be someone to take the punches. That's how it works. It isn't fair, it isn't right, but that kid licking slop off the floor over there means that we get to eat in peace.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“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, Solitary

“Hope. It is the most important thing in the world. I believe that now more than ever. Hope is what saved my
life, hope is what gave me the courage and the strength
to carry on. Hope – that unshakeable, golden belief that
things can get better.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Execution

“I'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom—one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“Better to be a spirit with the earth beneath you than a corpse pinned tight by the weight of the world.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Solitary

“Let's make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Solitary

“This place is full of unwritten rules.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“Trust me-that toilet and me were best friends for the first few days I was here.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“Only another twenty thousand or so days of this to go.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“Knackered inmates are easier to control than pumped-up ones. And dead inmates are even easier to control, if you follow me.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“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, Solitary

“Let me know if you're going to do something stupid, kid, 'cause I'll ditch you like that.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“One last breath. We all have to take one eventually. It was over.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Execution

“The world is an inferno. It will burn until every nation has fallen, until all who oppose us are dead, until people see the true light.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Fugitives

“It's incredible how much stamina you can find when you're fighting and enemy in battle, even if that enemy is just in your imagination.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith

“Don't need a degree in rocket science to do this job.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“That mush plays havoc downstairs, you know?”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“But nobody can run from their own demons.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Solitary

“And if there's nothing left of you but darkness, how can you not become a monster?”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Death Sentence

“Just take it from me," Donovan said. "Stay well clear of the warden. Some here think he's the devil. I don't, I don't believe in that religious talk, but I know evil when I see it. He's something rotten they dragged from the bowels of the earth, something they patched together from darkness and filth. He'll be the death of us all, every single one of us here in Furnace. Only question is when."
"I know one thing," I added. "The warden certainly brings out peoples dramatic sides."
Zee and Donovan both laughed through their noses.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Lockdown

“When you think about it, we´re all insane, we just don´t know it till we´re given a little push in the wrong direction.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith, Fugitives

“As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical 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

“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, Solitary

“I helped you because you're new, and because when there's two people in a cell then there's only a fifty percent chance they'll take you.”
― Alexander Gordon Smith