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Quote by Zeyn Joukhadar

“When I was a kid, I never wanted to leave the pool. I used to throw tantrums at the end of open swim. I told you it was because I loved swimming, because I wanted to feel like a dolphin, because I wanted to pretend for another five minutes to be a mermaid. Looking back, it wasn't that I wanted my body to feel magical; I wanted it to feel transparent.”

Quote by Zeyn Joukhadar

Work

The Thirty Names of Night

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Zeyn Joukhadar

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“The abnegation of empathy in the case of something as complex and variable as sexual taste is a dangerous thing. The particular misfortune of the paedophile is not that he is a walking manifestation of evil but that his or her sexual development (as much subject to nature, nurture and questions of identity as any of ours) has resulted in a potentially very harmful and unacceptable attraction. We rightly call it a disorder because of these damaging effects, but merely reacting with horror will do little towards solving a complex and difficult issue stemming from a sexual drive as real and compulsive as any of us are used to.”

“I thought they were going to kill me there and then, which would have been a relief. To my horror, they spoke words that I will never forget: ‘We are going to keep you in the cellar and let our black friends use you and when they have finished with you, we will kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester. There are hundreds of girls there, the police haven’t found them and they wont find you!”

“I wished at that moment that the Wests had killed me, it would have been a merciful release from the hell that DC Smith was putting me through. This barrage of questions by DC Smith and his heavy-handedness into this inquiry and his bullying barrack-room interrogation style of interviewing had left me feeling shamed.”

“As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.”

“Straightaway, they started chatting and telling me their names: Fred and Rose West. I was surprised that they were married, I wouldn’t have fancied someone like him, and she was pretty. I felt she could have done a lot better for herself, but they seemed happy and he was quite charming, in a roguish kind of way.”

“At 31 years of age, Fred West was a big man trapped in a little man’s body. He thought himself to be a gynecologist and Warren Beatty look-a-like all rolled into one … the surgeon and the stud.”

“Once you’d been with Freddie, you wouldn’t go anywhere else.’ (How true this was to prove.) This incessant bragging by Fred West was at best, annoying and at worst, sickening. According to him, he was God’s gift to women.”

“That high pitch scream emitted by Rose made me wince! Her ear bursting howls would stun me into silence as much as it silenced the eldest child in their home, eight-year-old Anna-Marie.”