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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“The cacophony of county jail is deafening: That's what hap- pens when you jam thousands of women into concrete rooms that were intended to house a population half our size. We sleep in bunk beds in the common areas, feet away from the tables where we play cards and read all day. We urinate in overwhelmed toilets that clog and overflow. We stand in lines for showers, meals, hair- cuts, telephones, meds. At all hours of the day and night, the con- crete echoes with screams and prayers and tears and laughter and curses. There is nothing to do here but wait. I mill around the common room in my canary-yellow prison suit, watching the hands of the clock in the cage on the wall slowly ticking away the minutes of the days. I wait for mealtime, though I have no interest in eating the gray slurry that slides around tray. I wait for the library cart to come around, so I can pick out the least offensive romance novel on offer. I wait for lights-out, so that I can lie in my upper bunk in the semi-dark, listening to the snores and whispers of my fellow inmates while I wait for sleep to come. my It hardly ever does. But mostly, I wait for someone to come help me.”

WaitingPrisonIsolationJail
Book:Pretty Things
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“+ Since when had he started to wait? Since he had made himself free for waiting by losing the desire for particular things, including the desire for the end of things. Waiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for, not even the end of waiting. Waiting is unaware of and destroys that which awaits. Waiting awaits nothing. Whatever the importance of the object of waiting may be, it is always infinitely surpassed by the movement of waiting. Waiting renders all things equally important, equally vain. In order to wait for the slightest thing, we have at our disposal an infinite capacity for waiting that seems inexhaustible.”

WaitingDesire For The End Of Things
Book:Awaiting Oblivion
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