Alexander Gordon Smith

“One last breath. We all have to take one eventually. It was over.”

“It surged inside me, setting every nerve ending alight, making me feel like I could snap my fingers and stop time, cut the stars from the heavens.”

“Hope. It is the most important thing in the world. I believe that now more than ever. Hope is what saved my life, hope is what gave me the courage and the strength to carry on. Hope – that unshakeable, golden belief that things can get better.”

“You don’t see heroism, humanity and hope like you do in a horror story. Horror celebrates the kind of friendship that keeps you standing shoulder to shoulder with someone even when the world is falling apart around you.”

“Like I've said before, so many times before, I'm not a good person, I'm not a hero. I'm a criminal, a liar, a cheat, a killer. It was them or me and I wanted to live.”

“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.”

“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 ..”

“Just take it from me," Donovan said. "Stay well clear of the warden. Some here think he's the devil. I don't, I don't believe in that religious talk, but I know evil when I see it. He's something rotten they dragged from the bowels of the earth, something they patched together from darkness and filth. He'll be the death of us all, every single one of us here in Furnace. Only question is when.""I know one thing," I added. "The warden certainly brings out peoples dramatic sides."Zee and Donovan both laughed through their noses.”

“The world is an inferno. It will burn until every nation has fallen, until all who oppose us are dead, until people see the true light.”

“It's incredible how much stamina you can find when you're fighting and enemy in battle, even if that enemy is just in your imagination.”

“Better to be a spirit with the earth beneath you than a corpse pinned tight by the weight of the world.”

“The human mind is a powerful thing in many ways, but in others it's endlessly fragile—it takes only a single moment of pure terror to tear a hole in it, like a finger through a cobweb, leaving you forever just a shadow, a half-person.”

“Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.”

“Let's make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here.”

“Nobody cares. You shouldn't either.”

“Let me know if you're going to do something stupid, kid, 'cause I'll ditch you like that.”

“There always has to be someone to take the punches. That's how it works. It isn't fair, it isn't right, but that kid licking slop off the floor over there means that we get to eat in peace.”

“This place is full of unwritten rules.”

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

“Don't need a degree in rocket science to do this job.”

“Only another twenty thousand or so days of this to go.”

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

“That mush plays havoc downstairs, you know?”

“Trust me-that toilet and me were best friends for the first few days I was here.”

“Don't make the mistake of bringing your heart down here with you, there is no place for it in Furnace.”

“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.”

“I helped you because you're new, and because when there's two people in a cell then there's only a fifty percent chance they'll take you.”

“I'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom—one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.”