Deb Roby

“Tyler had seen village dogs trained in much the same way for the ring. When an animal was beaten hard enough, it would work just to not be beaten, and consider itself well rewarded. The status quo could shift at any time.”
― Erika Johansen, The Invasion of the Tearling

“The risk her stories posed to others—and to herself—was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she’d found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn’t stay away from a secret—drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle—though she sensed it would be better for her not to know.”
― Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

“With the stories of people she’d known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages.”
― Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

“The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”17 This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”18”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness