Laertes

“Love is a gift. Mariam's words stick with me. People are more concerned by what two men or two women do in bed than about love. Love is companionship, feeling content and safe in the arms of another person. It is the mundane moments when you know the other person is there but you don't need to speak - their presence is enough, the meals shared, the walks taken, not just sex. What is so wrong about that?”
― Tufayel Ahmed, This Way Out

“[Federal prisons] are dreadful institutions whose procedures are designed to dehumanize the people they contain. And when you look at our rates of incarceration - roughly seven times higher than those of our peer nations, higher even then the Soviet Union under Stalin - you can't help but feel there is something wrong with a society that feels the need to lock so many of its citizens in cages.”
― Brad Parks, Say Nothing

“Security was a myth, a grand lie we told ourselves to mask the jarring reality of the human condition: that the social contract was written in sand, not stone, and it could be blown away at any time, by anyone with sufficient breath his lungs.”
― Brad Parks, Say Nothing

“The truth was, she hadn't felt much like a cop in a long time. That was a place she never thought she'd get to. Be just like the rest of them after ten years. Angry and drunk. Numb to pretty much everything. That wasn't supposed to be her. But she now knew what they all knew: that the very thing you need to stay strong and keep your head, that daily and deliberate apathy you practice like meditation, is the very thing that, in the end, robs you of your desire to get in the car and catch bad guys. Nobody tells you that, once you put on the armor, you can never take it off.”
― Scott Frank