Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others,

what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

the only pleasure within my grasp was the all-too-rare one of satisfied curiosity.

After our escape, Dorothy used to say: ‘Let’s organise our life, let’s not waste our thoughts.’ The fact was, I could use my thoughts as I pleased, the idea of wasting them was absurd. My survival was guaranteed, I would never exhaust all the food available, and the rare bad weather had never made me ill. I could allow my mind to wander as it

I told myself that I’d been hypocritical and, since I had no one to lie to, I discovered that you can lie to yourself, which felt very strange. Was I missing companionship more than I thought and making myself into another, a witness, if only to deceive her?

I do not know whether I am still able to speak. Of course, all I have to do is try, but I don’t seem to want to. And what does it matter if I’ve become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?

There had been so much hope when we’d escaped from the prison, and then this slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.

We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.

Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.