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“Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
It must eat and breath air and sleep,
It has thin skin and blood right underneath,
An adequate stock of teeth and nails,
Its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it is shuddered
Before the founding of Rome and after,
In the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it’s just the earth that’s grown smaller,
And whatever happens seems on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed.
It’s just that there are more people,
Besides the old offenses, new ones have appeared,
Real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
But the howl with which the body responds to them,
Was, and is, and ever will be a howl of innocence
According to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed.
Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances,
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tries to pull away
Its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
It turns blue, swells, salivates, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except of course for the course of boundaries,
The lines of forests, coasts, deserts, and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
Disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
Alien to itself, elusive
At times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
While the body is and is and is
And has no place of its own.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags��, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mouth

“Keeping hatred against someone is like helping him to torture you”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“Those were the tortures of the night. The tortures of the day consisted in pretending to eat, pretending to play, pretending to be happy, passing the hours, enduring the sympathetic looks and the loving remarks.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“আম�� বাংলাদেশকে ঘৃণা কর��, কারণ এট�� আমার মাতৃভূমিকে নির্যাতন করে।”
― Shobuj Taposh

“I hate Bangladesh, because it tortures my motherland.”
― Shobuj Taposh

“Check out this fish knife," they said, holding it up with a flourish. Though the shelves running through the big, warehouse-like space were tall, the ceiling light still glinted off the knife's hooked, nasty top. "Bet I could fillet Vanilla Joe like a trout."
"I would not advise that," I said. Kel's face dropped, until I held up a cheese grater the size of my head. "How about grating him instead?"
That was perhaps a tiny bit of overkill for his general level of douchebaggery, but we shared a grim laugh anyway.”
― Amanda Elliot, Sadie on a Plate