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I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our happy little family willing to own up to what they did. I committed murder.
it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.
what he really had in mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb, like a disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which may bite.
Given a second chance I would not do it again, but I’m not sure that means I am rehabilitated.
I got three of those green milkshakes they serve at McDonald’s around St. Paddy’s Day for a crazy Irishman named O’Malley;
It’s the risk you run when you’re the guy who can get it.
during the long nights when time draws out like a blade.
I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won’t help anyone kill himself or anyone else.
In all my years at Shawshank, there have been less than ten men whom I believed when they told me they were innocent.
Andy told her he would see her in hell before he would see her in Reno.
Four drinks a year—and that is the behavior of a man who has been bitten hard by the bottle. Hard enough to draw blood.
I was pig-drunk, too drunk to have been thinking about muffling the gunshots. If I’d done it, I just would have let them rip.”
“Isn’t that Jake, Red?” It was. That pigeon was just as dead
I don’t have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.
what I thought of Andy Dufresne would have a lot to do with how his time went. He probably knew it, too, but he wasn’t kowtowing or sucking up to me, and I respected him for that.
Yes, I think it would be fair to say I liked Andy from the first.
I didn’t see the rock-hammer again for nineteen years, and by then it was damned near worn away to nothing.
I admired that… and I admired him. 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.
He looked up at Bogs smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the three of them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to him just as hard as they
could. Just as if he was wearing one of his three-piece bankers’ suits instead of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet floor with his pants around his ankles and blood trickling down the insides of his thighs. “In fact,” he went on, “I understand that the bite-reflex is sometimes so strong that the victim’s jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a jackhandle.” Bogs
He always fought back, and as a result, he did his time in solitary. But I don’t think solitary was the hardship for Andy that it was for some men. He got along with himself.
Rock-blankets, indeed.
Hayworth. I’ll tell you the truth, it kind of tickled
When you’re in a pressure-cooker you learn to live and let live or somebody will carve you a brand-new mouth just above the Adam’s apple. You learn to make allowances.
But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face—the shadow of the bars on his single slit window.
that. To us long-timers who knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost, of myth-magic,
The oath of a convicted murderer may not be worth much, but believe this: I don’t lie.
I looked for a long time. For a few minutes it was like I didn’t even dare touch them, they were so pretty. There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.
too. A sense of awe for the man’s brute persistence. But I never knew just how persistent Andy Dufresne could be until much later.
If you gave him a cool drink of apple cider, he’d think about vinegar. If you told him his wife had always been faithful to him, he’d tell you it was because she was so damn ugly.
“And to drive it, if they’re old enough,” Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew which side his bread was buttered on, and he didn’t say what must have been as obvious to him as to the rest of us: If that money’s worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I’ll just take it off your hands. After all, what are friends for?
He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible bad luck he’d had to inherit that thirty-five thousand dollars.
Like everyone else, I look after my own ass first. I have to. It’s cracked already,
and I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.
It was Hadley who had the gun on his hip and the billy in his hand, Hadley who had his friend Greg Stammas behind him and the whole prison administration behind Stammas, the whole power of the State behind that, but all at once in that golden sunshine it didn’t matter,
“Yes, I understand that,” Andy said softly. And he did understand it. The way it turned out, he understood a lot more than I did—more than any of us did.
He sat hunkered down in the shade, hands dangling between his knees, watching us and smiling a little. It’s amazing how many men remember him that way, and amazing how many men were on that work-crew when Andy Dufresne faced down Byron Hadley. I thought there were nine or ten of us, but by 1955 there must have been two hundred of us, maybe more… if you believed what you heard.
somehow that graymeat son of a bitch managed to bring in something else as well. A sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end… or maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned gray walls. It was a kind of inner light he carried around with him.
Yeah, I guess the State got its own back on Brooksie, all right. They trained him to like it inside the shithouse and then they threw him out.
He used the same force of will I’d seen him use on Byron Hadley to get what he wanted for the library, and I saw him gradually turn one small room (which still smelled of turpentine because it had been a paint closet until 1922 and had never been properly aired) lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and National Geographies into the best prison library in New England.
Red,”
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.”
A kid had come in back in 1938, a kid with a big mop of carroty red hair, half-crazy with remorse, thinking about suicide.
Bad draft in that cell. All the time cold. He don’t let nobody touch his things. That’s okay. Nice man, never made fun. But big draft.”
I asked him once what the posters meant to him, and he gave me a peculiar, surprised sort of look. “Why, they mean the same thing to me as they do to most cons, I guess,” he said. “Freedom. You look at those pretty women and you feel like you could almost… not quite but almost… step right through and be beside them. Be free.
Didn’t you ever feel that way about a picture, Red? That you could almost step right through it?”
“Maybe someday you’ll see what I mean,” he said, and he was right. 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.
He had a Bible quote for every occasion, did Mr. Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
The construction businesses in the area were deathly afraid of Norton’s Inside-Out program, because prison labor is slave labor, and you can’t compete with that.
Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favors is by checking their bank accounts.
