Prison Quotes

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
― Simone Weil

“ان التجربة التي خضتها داخل السجن كانت اغنى ألف مرة من تجارب اخرين خارجه. لقد اختبرت الوجه الاخر للحياة من ألم و خوف و رعب و معاناة و جوع و برد ... تعلمت ماذا ثعني الحياة و ماذا يعني الموت. و تأملت مليا في الخلق و الكون.”
― Malika Oufkir, Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

“That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.”
― Vladimir Bartol, Alamut

“Unforgiveness denies the victim the possibility of parole and leaves them stuck in the prison of what was, incarcerating them in their trauma and relinquishing the chance to escape beyond the pain.”
― T. D. Jakes

“The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty”
― Ben Franklin

“While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.”
― Tiffany Madison

“Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of
iron or of gold.”
― Henrik Ibsen, The Vikings of Helgeland

“Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Flight Of The Eagle

“He offered her power, money, status...
a giant prison, all in exchange
for only...her soul.”
― Jamie Weise

“You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.”
― Piper Kerman

“La joie réside au plus intime de l'âme; on peut aussi bien la posséder dans une obscure prison que dans un palais.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux

“Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, Der Sozialismus und die Seele des Menschen

“You're still in prison if you do nothing better in freedom.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.”
― Richard Lovelace, To Althea, from Prison

“Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside. All it takes is their perception that they belong there.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Unglued: Making Wise Choices in the Midst of Raw Emotions

“I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“THE CURSE

May they never
Return home at night...

May you have no part of eventide,
May you have no room of your own,
Nor road, nor return.
May your days be all exactly the same,
Five Fridays in a row,
Always an unlucky Tuesday,
No Sunday,
May you have no more little worries,
Tears or inspiration,
For you yourself are the greatest worry on earth:

Prisoner!”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry (Green Integer)

“you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Don't be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“IN OUR CELLS

They keep us in our cells
For a long time...

And, if we get out,
We lug them with us on our shoulders,
Like a porter with a chest of goods.”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry (Green Integer)

“I am a waning bird
encased in a glass sphere;
I cannot see my prison,
and my cries no one can hear.”
― Craig Froman, An Owl on the Moon: A Journal From the Edge of Darkness

“A real prison breakfast" I said.
"Yeah, but we are free."
And that summed it up.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads from city down to jungle; the prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit: the entire continent is at his disposal. But no prisoner ever ventures far from the gate; and, when his presence is required, it is only necessary to unlock the gate and call his name.”
― Jack Vance, The Star King

“While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“Am intrat în închisoare orb, cu vagi străfulgerări autogene ale beznei, care despică întunericul fără a-l risipi, şi ies cu ochii deschişi. Am intrat răsfăţat, răzgâiat. Ies vindecat de fasoane, nazuri, ifose. Am intrat nemulţumit. Ies cunoscând fericirea. Am intrat nervos, supărăcios, sensibil la fleacuri. Ies nepăsător. Soarele şi viaţa îmi spuneau puţin. Acum ştiu să gust felioara de pâine cât de mică. Ies admirând mai presus de orice curajul, demnitatea, onoarea, eroismul. Ies împăcat. Cu cei cărora le-am greşit, cu prietenii şi duşmanii mei, ba şi cu mine însumi".”
― Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii

“This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.”
― Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison