Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption

I don’t get all those things gratis, and for some items the
price comes high. But I don’t do it just for the money; what good is money to
me? I’m never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to Jamaica for two weeks in
2
February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will only sell you fresh
meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I refuse to
handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won’t help anyone kill himself or anyone
else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Then came April 23rd, a day I'll not forget even if I live another fifty- eight years.

There's a big hay field in Buxton, Andy had said, and at the north end of that hayfield there's a rock wall, right oat of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield.

March and April of 1977,

Now it's May of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

“Zihuatanejo,” he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. “Down in Mexico. It's a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway Thirty- seven. It's a hundred miles northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?”

I told him I didn't.

“They say it has no memory. And that's where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.”