#torture

We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way. ↗

— Erich Hoeber

#attracted #been #being #characters #circumstances

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#torture #waterboarding #experience

Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out and eventually began to be listened to and believed. Ritual abuse survivors, when they try to speak out about their experiences, face denial and disbelief from society and often fear for their lives from the abusers. ↗

— Laurie Matthew

#child-abuse #childabuse #childhood-abuse #mental-health-professionals #rape

What in god’s name happened to your nuts?” “They met a jet-powered water hose.” He grimaced. “They’re already healing.” A rare glint of amusement lit Lawrence’s eyes. “You have balls of steel.” “You have inappropriate humour. ↗

— Dianna Hardy

#humor #humour #nuts #torture #humor

Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#torture #truth #imagination

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer. ↗

— Robert Smythe Hichens

#torture #imagination

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible. ↗

— Don Roff

#humor #torture #writing #humor

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#god-s-will #grief #self-awareness #torture #self-awareness

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it. ↗

— Don Roff

#finishing #revising #tips #tips-on-writing #torture

I try to keep in mind” I recite dryly as I run the front sight of my pistol over his face, “that my life is only as significant, as I am to the lives of others.” He’s sobbing and won’t look up from the floor so I lean close to his ear and ask softly, “Would you say that I’m significant to your life? ↗

— Dennis Sharpe

#dark-humor #torture #humor