Alexander Gordon Smith

“Yeah, because you'll really be showing them, won't you. Talk about cutting up your wrists to spite your fate.”

“This thing was what existed before life, before the first stars, before the big bang. It was the emptiness before the universe, and the emptiness that would follow.”

“When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing.”

“When you're locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms.”

“As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare ..”

“Knackered inmates are easier to control than pumped-up ones. And dead inmates are even easier to control, if you follow me.”

“You don't have friends in here, you'll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you'll just lose them. They'll get shanked or they'll jump or they'll be taken one night.”

“And what could the darkness be, other than humanity? This crushing, heavy mass of people who had no legitimate right to life. How many souls lived on earth now? Six billion? Seven? All of them like insects, crawling around on their hands and knees or slaughtering one another in pursuit of scraps. They were ignorant, they were cruel, they were the night that smothered the day. They did not deserve their existence.”

“I guess a little bit hero is enough. A little bit hero is all anyone really needs to be.”

“You don't have to be perfect to be good. You can do bad things and still be a good person.”

“Hope-that unshakable golden belief that things can get better- is why I'm here talking to you now. Without it, we are nothing.”