Reentry Quotes

“Deprived of my shackles, I was unable to find my balance and I tottered like a woman drunk on cheap liquor. I had to learn how to speak again, how to communicate with my fellow creatures, and no longer be content with a word here and there. I had to learn how to look them in the eyes again. I had to learn how to do my hair again now that it had become a tangle of untidy snakes hissing around my head. I had to rub ointments on my dry, cracked, skin, which had become like a badly tanned hide. Few people have the misfortune to be born twice.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“I was working in the space industry in Hawaii when the second space shuttle burned up on reentry.”
― Steven Magee

“When they were incarcerated, I saw them through their writing, and myself through the teaching. Writing showed me how they had gotten trapped in patterns that revealed their character developing over time. Writing led to greater awareness of—and compassion for—the person who had struggled earlier in life but who now chose to struggle differently. When they got out, I realized, dimly, that they were done writing. I was done teaching. Nothing lay between us but reality unfolding. - from After Jail, Before Freedom”
― David Coogan, After Jail, Before Freedom