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Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow

"If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist, unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued far more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policemen routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallup poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you to no end."

"In theory, there is a presumption of innocence in the American legal system, innocent until proven guilty, but in practice, it is just the opposite. Juries trust the police and the prosecutors, especially when the jurors are middle-class white folks. They think that if someone gets arrested and goes on trial, there must be good reasons to believe that he did it."

Squashed by Joan Bauer

"Winning's a fine thing, Ellie, but it's all the months and years before and after that made you who you are."

Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir by Sonya Huber

"Poverty and numbers alone had run us up against a last refuge, the generosity of a hospital that could write us off by claiming a donation to the poor. These things are the opposite of a guarantee and so the opposite of a sense of security. They impart the adrenaline rush of a bullet whizzing by one's ear, clipping millimeters of flesh and delivering a narrow margin of safety that emphasizes its own transience. This was my first real sense of us as three, as a family; three was the number that made our combined income not genteel poverty but a bit of an emergency, and three was the number that made the $3,000 disappear. I felt so guilty for putting my son to work in the numbers game in the weeks before he even understood the outlines of this world. He was already working, already helping with too much of the burden, for this thin-stretched family."

Every Thing On It by Shel Silverstein

Wall Marks

Those stratchy marks there on the wall,
They show how short I used to be.
They rise until they get this tall,
And Mama keeps reminding me
The way my Dad would take his pen
And as I stood there, stiff and straight,
He'd put a ruler on my head
And mark the spot and write the date.
She says that it's my history,
But I don't understand at all
Just why she cries each time she sees
Those sratchy marks there on the wall.

Yesees and Noees

The Yesees said yes to anything
That anyone suggested.
The Noees said no to everything
Unless it was proven and tested.
So the Yesees all died of much too much
And the Noees all died of fright,
But somehow I think the Thinkforyourselfees
All came out all right.