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Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term.
He was the type of man who, if he had decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until his affairs had been put neatly in order.
If enough people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader.”
In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t, and plenty of them aren’t in prison, either.
No physical harm done—but rape is rape, and eventually you have to look at your face in the mirror again and decide what to make of yourself.
But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face—the shadow of the bars on his single slit window.
Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been worked and made—that’s
Mert Entwhistle.
I think I know why that happens—they are able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the State to watch over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain. Others can’t, or won’t.
And those two jailhouse staples, Erie Stanley Gardner and Louis L’ Amour. Cons never seem to get enough of the courtroom or the open range.
the amount of expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.
Because guys like us, Red, we know there’s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It’s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you judge how well you’re doing by how well you sleep at night . . . and what your dreams are like.”
Nice man, never made fun. But big draft.”
Years later I saw exactly what he meant . . . and when I did, the first thing I thought of was Normaden, and about how he’d said it was always cold in Andy’s cell.
Phrases like that, selective perception, are required learning for people in the penology and corrections business, and they use them all they can.
Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There’s good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.
More often than not a con who’s just out will pull some dumb job that hasn’t a chance in hell of succeeding . . . and why? Because it’ll get him back inside. Back where he understands how things work.
Old life blown away in the wink of an eye, indeterminate nightmare stretching out ahead, a long season in hell.
All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after awhile, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game.
At first you can’t stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them . . . and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to live on an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can smoke. If you’re at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you’re assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that’s the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap;
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Writing about yourself seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water and roiling up the muddy bottom.
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
There’s only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the young ones. No one ever looks at either kind.
That’s what a whole life in prison does for you, young man. It turns everyone in a position of authority into a master, and you into every master’s dog. Maybe you know you’ve become a dog, even in prison, but since everyone else in gray is a dog, too, it doesn’t seem to matter so much. Outside, it does.
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
He looked like the total all-American kid
“Todd is an extremely apt pupil.”
The house was a small bungalow set discreetly back on its lot.
German efficiency, Todd thought, and his smile widened a little.
His current ambition was to become a private detective when he grew up.
the man who was pretending to be Arthur Denker called querulously.
He might have dropped it right there, Todd thought much later on one of the nights when sleep was hard to find.
he was an American boy, and he had been taught that persistence is a virtue.
“Don’t forget your paper, Mr. Dussander,”
He hadn’t expected Dussander to be good; he had expected Dussander to be great.
“Bergen-Belsen, January 1943 to June 1943. Auschwitz, June 1943 to June of 1944, Unterkommandant. Patin—”
“That was good,” he said sincerely. “Really commanding. It was Ilse Koch who had the lampshades made out of human skin, wasn’t it? And she was the one who had the trick with the little glass tubes.”
Todd’s eyes suddenly gleamed. “Did you spank any of them? The women? Did you take off their clothes and—”
Todd said coldly: “You better not do that.”
I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff.”
“It comes all at once,” Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. “You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That’s why Careers Day is so important, children—it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.”
trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things, and his head began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but
“You guys just went overboard, you know that? You really did.”
“An aficionado,” Dussander said, “is one who grooves. One who . . . gets off on something.”
I think a person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It’s corny but true.”
The banker who bought them for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year after I bought them . . . life is sometimes strange, boy, hein?”
Reference to Shawshank Redemption
The thought of blackmailing Dussander had never even crossed Todd’s mind. Money? What would he do with it? He had his allowance; he had his paper route. If his monetary needs went higher than what these could provide during any given week, there was always someone who needed his lawn mowed.
“Why . . . I want to hear about it. That’s all. That’s all I want. Really.”
“You are a monster,” he said softly.
