Quotes from Alex Kotlowitz

you can't talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that's slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.

There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.

The shooting doesn't end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.

In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony...

Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?

This is grief. You feel ripped in half. Half of you wanting to retreat, to disappear, to find a place where no one asks questions. And then there's the part of you that wants to remember, has to remember because if you don't, not only will the day cease to exist but so will the reality of that moment.

The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.

If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," he told me. If, not when.

They've seen too much to be children.

Her hope—and mine—was that a book about the children would make us all hear, that it would make us all stop and listen.

Built in 1975, the Division Four unit is, like Henry Horner, made of cinder block, which jail authorities quickly learned did not provide the best of security. Because prisoners scraped through the mortar with metal spoons, the jail switched to plastic utensils in 1979. And after several inmates used the top of their dressers to beat through the walls, some in as little time as a minute and a half, the dressers were finally removed in 1981.

I'm going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…

You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city's gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.

People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.