"For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain's darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. [...] He could not even tell the names of those who'd taken the rap for him. / To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others. / What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-sounding fraud meant by that? Why had several snickered then and not one had laughed out from the heart? Bednar hadn't understood then and could not let himself understand now. It had been too long since he himself had laughed from the heart. / Yet the words had left him with a secret and wishful envy of every man with a sentence hanging over his head like the very promise of salvation."
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Captain Bednar after questioning suspects.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Arm
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The Man with the Golden Arm
' (1949) is a novel by American writer Nelson Algren. It won the 1950 and was adapted into the 1955 film of the same name.
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