Danny Steele Quotes

Pape called Basil his sanctuary. In truth we all exist in our own sanctuaries-but I don't mean cathedrals or prisons. I'm talking about our hearts and minds, which imprison us in anxiety, dear, insecurity, anger and other forms of misery. The walls & bars that keep most in a constant state of suffering are thoughts and emotions, not concrete & steel. It's a disease. Insanity. Most are afflicted by it, regardless of which side of the law they find themselves on or where they lay their heads at night. To be free of this, Renee, is to be free indeed.

His knees locked and he pushed his weight against Mr. Jones’s hand. It wasn’t the dim light coming through the skylights or the giant steel fan that waited to chop them up or the smell of urine or the dank-dungeon cells that lined both sides of the aisle that made Danny step back. It was a sense of panic, of fear, that saturated the atmosphere like an electrical current, tingling in his bowels. The boys ahead of him didn’t seize up, but they stutter-stepped. Like the end of a ship’s plank was dead ahead. Danny felt this type of fear spreading through his groin like cold fingers once before. A memory emerged in the soupy sea of memories inside his head. He remembered getting pulled out of the back seat of a car with his hands cuffed behind his back by someone. But then like everything he tried to remember, there were gaps.

I was in awe of him. He was a beautiful man with a strong jaw and soft eyes. He was very kind and smiled a lot and, even more endearingly, he actually laughed at my antics. I could tell that he liked me, and I think he could tell that I liked him. We were so different from each other, he being a priest and I a recovered junkie. He being a man who stood nearly six feet and solid as a steel beam, me being a a woman just over five feet, weighing in at about half his size. He growing up in Bosnia in a loving family that had been killed, me growing up in Atlanta with two parents who didn’t love me enough to stick around. He being a meat eater, me being a vegetarian. But in other important ways we were similar, I thought. We both valued cleanliness. We both loved people. We both hated injustice. We both listened to jazz and classical music as well as pop and rock.