“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”