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“To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.”
― Orson Scott Card, Empire

“Don't allow yourself to be held hostage by the opinion of others.”
― Laurie Buchanan

“The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it's to lower emotions.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Olivia sat back and propped her half-boots on the table. 'So far it's working. He has to return to me because I have his sister hostage.' She briefly put her fingertips to her lips. 'Did I just say that? I mean I'm protecting the baby sister and earning his trust”
― Kresley Cole, If You Dare

“She put her tongue out and felt the raw edges of the torn silk. She looped her tongue around them and drew them into her teeth. Just a little bit, she thought, that's all I need to free my eyelids. She pulled the tasteless web between her teeth and ground, pulling her jaw down in a grimace - it felt as it she was eating the very skin off her face. But the silk over her eyelids shifted.”
― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

“I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“That day wasn't the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings - back then I thought it an act of empowerment. Otherwise I had very little power to make any decisions about my life, my body, my actions. Taking my own life seemed my last trump card.”
― Natascha Kampusch, 3,096 Days

“Man is a hostage to the cage of cultural programming and the mass hallucination of the propagandist’s narrative illusion.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, The Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies

“The men and women who continue to hold Lynn's mind hostage against her will believe the future will be tilled with terrorism, death, destruction and a challenge to the survival of America. They believe Lynn and the other lab rats must still respond to their programming for they are the second line of defence against enemies from within and without and the first line of offence in a catastrophe which would require the recreation of America's constitutional government. They are still intent on preparing Lynn for the day when she will he necessary for battle.
One summer day, all these dark realisations came flooding upon Lynn and she knew if she was ever to free herself, she needed to get immediate help.”
― Lynn Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country

“Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please.”
― Shannon Celebi

“She was kidnapped, held hostage in her own nightmare, being tortured by her own mind.”
― Arti Manani, The Colours of Denial

“It was inelegant, but what was not when taking a hostage?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre

“Be careful that the decisions that you ‘makeâ€� are not forging the chains that you cannot ‘unmakeâ€� because those are the chains that will eventually ‘unmakeâ€� you.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Don't hold him hostage just because he says something different from his previous opinion. Different circumstances need different perspective.”
― Sarvesh Jain

“The Sniper Bird by Stewart Stafford

"Look out!" the crowd shouted to me,
"There's a Sniper Bird in those trees!"
A whooshing sound shot past my ears,
Making me duck down to my knees.

He must have gone rogue, I reckoned,
Someone cheated him over birdseed,
Then he took a squirrel as his hostage,
Get a negotiator quickly up those trees.

He threw up his wings and surrendered,
They brought him down in a gilded cage,
Never again sniping at innocent people,
He studies elocution with a parrot sage.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In the room, the clocks tick, unseen.

It has been a day of shadows and redirection,
revelation and lies. Diane gets the vague
sense that Kotey � with his confi dence and
his silence � might think himself to be the
smartest person in the room. He is intelligent
yes, but it’s an intelligence that needs to wear
a disguise. And besides, the smartest person
in the room is the one who knows she, or
he, is never the smartest at all: herein lies the
contradiction. She wonders now if he has just
said exactly the things she wanted to hear? She
knows herself to be naïve at times: she admits
this to herself. Yes, it is true, she has often been
far too open to people in the past. She has been
stung. Government offi cials who have deceived
her. Pretenders from the FBI. Misdirection
from the State Department and White House.
Politicians. Negotiators. Informers. Conmen.
And, perhaps now, Kotey. But she also knows
that the naivety is necessary to cultivate
something deeper. She wants to remain open
to the world. Compassion, Lord. And mercy.
And patience.

There will be one more session tomorrow.
Perhaps they will achieve something more
than this intimate stand-off . But then again,
perhaps nothing.

She pulls back her chair and thanks him. It is
dangerous, she knows, to thank him, her son’s
murderer. But she must do it anyway. Perhaps
it’s only politeness. Perhaps it’s something
more.

“In another life,� she says, “you and Jim might
have been friends.”
― Colum McCann

“And the PRCS [Palestinian Red Crescent Society] had not lost just one hospital: thirteen clinics and nine hospitals all over Lebanon had been destroyed in this way. Only Gaza Hospital, for a reason I was to discover three years later, was still standing. At the height of the air raids, when the Palestinians found out that every single PRCS hospital and clinic was a bomb target, they put three Israeli soldiers captured in south Lebanon on the upper floors of Gaza Hospital, and radioed a message to the Israeli Army saying that any further military action on Gaza Hospital would result in Israeli lives being lost. That saved Gaza Hospital from further destruction.”
― Ang Swee Chai, From Beirut to Jerusalem

“I can hear you crying
I can sense your fear
And not much longer now baby doll
I am getting near.”
― Frank Julius, BLOOD DICE

“We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn’t want to be special. I didn’t want them to be curious about me.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“If our cherished rubrics are in any way threatened, we immediately rise up and bring the whole our ourselves to bear in a rigorous defense of them. And might it be that what we’ve errantly defined as a ‘threatâ€� is in fact an act of liberation that we didn’t see as such simply because (unbeknownst to us) our rubrics have become our own asphyxiating prisons and we’ve become our own wardens. Hence, let us dare not confuse the rescue mission that we call Christmas with anything less than what it is.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I was once held hostage by a patient in the hospital. I was fortunate I knew the department layout and I was able to free myself by darting out of a door while my terrorist was distracted.”
― Steven Magee

“An abductor is reliant on your silence.”
― Steven Magee

“Cardan draws a sharp breath and then lets it out slowly. 'I'd prefer to live.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“I don't mind being one-handed,' Cardan interjects. 'But if you're going to restrain both of my hands, then you'll have to pour the wine directly in to my mouth.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“Doubt would hold us hostage to the belief that we are a pathetic compilation of inadequacies. Yet such thoughts are nothing more than the fiction of our fear.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Do it,â€� Don Marco snapped again. “Take her now. She won’t be able to put up any struggle, and as soon as you do, we can deal with the marriage paperwork. She never has to leave this room until we’re ready to send her to the whorehouse where she belongs.â€�

Excerpt From: Raven Blaire. “Unclaimed Princess And 4 Mafia Gods: An Age-Gap Enemies to Lovers Reverse Harem Romance.â€� Apple Books.”
― Raven Blaire, Unclaimed Princess and 4 Mafia Gods

“Wrath and judgment scraped across her skin. They watched her, waiting for her to shatter. Didn’t they know she was already broken? They’d taken her family, her castle, her kingdom, and now they’d taken her blood. What was there left to take? Surely they’d find it and take that, too. 
--Saga Volsik”
― Demi Winters, Kingdom of Claw

“It might be that the vastness of our humanity is held hostage to the fear of its potential.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough