The Blinding Absence Of Light (11)

 is like the prison it describes,

not a place for the weak of constitution,

it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.

But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...

Chapter 31, page 155

'Death has a smell. A mixture of brackish water, vinegar, and pus. It's sharp, astringent. The screech owl's cry was always accompanied by that particular odour. We did not have to verify it - we knew it instinctively. In the morning when the guards brought coffee, we would tell them, "Could be someone's dead. Better check".'.

That is the end of this series of quotations. More quotes were possible, but in the last 35 pages of the book so much changes after what was a definitive darkness, it seemed to me that it is better read in total.