Tara

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
― Cheryl Strayed

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Oh, please. Everyone in this town always says that, like you have to be born here to understand things. I understand plenty. You're only as weird as you want to be.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...

[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
― Laura Hillenbrand