Prison Quotes - Page 6

Kaladin frowned. “Wait. Are you wearing cologne? In prison?”“Well, there was no need to be barbaric, just because I was incarcerated.”“Storms, you’re spoiled,” Kaladin said, smiling.“I’m refined, you insolent farmer,” Adolin said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’ll have you know that I had to use cold water for my baths while here.”“Poor boy.

bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.

Prison is like high school with knives.

Your belief is mostly your prison! To discover the world outside your prison, you must first realize the walls surrounding you! Otherwise you shall continue being stuck in the prison of childish tales and fallacious illusions!

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Sometimes a revolution turns into an actual government, or at the very least an actual way of life that contrasts with days past like blood on snow. Such was the case in France, where even as the guillotine released a steady river of gore, Royalist insurrections were suppressed by what had become a sophisticated military.In Toulon, the Royalist insurrection in 1793 led to an actual siege by republicans, spearheaded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. The Royalists in Toulon, supported by the British and Spanish, were feared by the republicans as an existential threat to every hope and promise of the revolution. For months there were bombardments, cannon fire that made the windows in the prison tremble.

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.

See this abdicated beast, once kingOf them all, nibble his claws:Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—To break his teeth on the bars.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.

Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?”“An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.”“What happened to him?”“The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

I have spent my whole life preparing to be William Wallace’s wife. The choices I make are defined by the person I am.“I am Mrs. William Victor Wallace. I am married to a federal felon whom I love unconditionally.I hold my head high, I take pride in my life and I walk this world without regret.I will be the perfect wife and my husband deserves nothing less.

Murderers — serving life sentences — were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection.

Most doctors are prisoners of their education and shackled by their profession.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

She is shocked by the rows of thick Plexiglas windows, each equipped with a telephone, each with a prisoner on one side and an outsider on the other. There is a teenage girl chatting with a prisoner who is presumably her father. There’s a married couple talking to their daughter. There’s a woman with a baby in her arms, sobbing into her phone as she begs her husband not to plead guilty for his crimes. Jail is terrifying to Geraldine, not only because it’s a house of criminals but also because it’s a cold slap in the face, a reminder of where she will eventually end up. “You’ve got to stay with me the whole time, Callo! I’m serious, you CANNOT leave me here.”“I’ll never,” Callo vows, but he’s eyeing her strangely. “Just remember which side of the glass you’re on right now, Geraldine.

We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!

There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.

In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

(From Danielle Raver's short story THE ENCHANTRESS)Thick chains attached to the wall hold a metal collar and belt, restraining most of the tiger's movements. Open, bloody slashes cover his face and back, but he shows no loss of strength as he pulls on the chains and tries to rip the flesh of the surrounding humans with his deadly claws. Out of his reach, I kneel down before him, and his lightning-blue eyes cross my space for a moment. “Get her out of there!” I hear from behind me.“Numnerai,” I speak urgently to the tiger. “They will kill you!” He growls and gnashes his teeth, but I sense he is responding to me. “Great white tiger, your duty is to protect the prince. But how can you do that if they sink the end of a spear into your heart?” He looks at me for a longer moment. The fighters respond to this by growing still. In their desperation, they are overlooking my foolishness for a chance to save their fellows' lives. I crouch on my feet and begin to nudge closer to him. The tiger growls a warning, but does not slash out at me. “Think of the prince, protector of the palace. Right now he prays for you to live.

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

I am a waning birdencased in a glass sphere;I cannot see my prison,and my cries no one can hear.

HAVING NEVER taken a decent holiday before, I decided on a trip to Thailand, booked a flight and flew out the following week. Mate, I loved it. The friendly people, the food, the females!

All during that prison time I really lived by prayer. Be in prayer always, we're told, and back then I was.

...I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.

And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I'd go to prison.Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody'll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.

I want to release my soul from its prison cell, to silence the guards who tell me that I am not capable of living. Every voice that ever told me that I cannot achieve has, at this moment, become silenced. This cell is no longer my home.

They can't give you all that, Mr Jimson,' said Walter, who was upset. 'It wouldn't be right. What would they give you seven years for?''Being Gulley Jimson,' I said, 'and getting away with it.

We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.

Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living masses.We walk toward its pathno earthly power surpasses.

We’re not broken. We’re not in the wrong bodies. We’re not inadequate. We’re not lesser. We’re not unwanted. We’re not fraudulent. We’re not undesirable. That’s all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the experience of the prisons we put ourselves in.

Freedom comes with a price while bondage takes hold without notice

Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?

Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ryDo not fear that your stay will besolit’ryCountless souls share your fate,you’ll have company!

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

anyone who has no feelings for animals has a dead heart.

the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.

There is more than one sort of prison, Captain," Chirrut said. "I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.

She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars.

The prison bars deny you the now. You are forced to always think about the past or the future.

The massive prison construction represents a commitment by our nation to plan for social failure by spending billions of dollars to lock up hundreds of thousands of people while at the same time cutting billions of dollars from programs that would provide opportunity to young Americans.

The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longer stand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison, so that my release brings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prison life, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and indulge all the time in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when, eventually, I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Looks sure can be deceiving: not every ‘ugly’ person is a ‘bad’ person (or is guilty of whatever it is that they are accused of).

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.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves.

I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.

Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.

He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?

They say you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats its prisoners…I believe the same can be said for how a country treats its children

They were the prisoners hidden in different cages, and yet they saw each other every day. He named her fire and she named him the wind, the day they both touched and embraced each other they burnt down everything that stood in their way.

Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.

He was about to cross a point of no return. The place separating him from the imaginary line in the sand. The one society demanded no one cross. He crossed the point on many occasions. This would be different. This could land him in prison or the electric chair. The prospect filled him with sexual energy he normally lacked