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Prison Quotes

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Prison Quotes

“Now this word soul, which pops up frequently in Van Norden’s soliloquies, used to have a droll effect upon me at first. Whenever I heard the word soul from his lips I would get hysterical; somehow it seemed like a false coin, more particularly because it was usually accompanied by a gob of brown juice which left a trickle down the corner of his mouth. And as I never hesitated to laugh in his face it happened invariably that when this little word bobbed up Van Norden would pause just long enough for me to burst into a cackle and then, as if nothing had happened, he would resume his monologue, repeating the word more and more frequently and each time with more caressing emphasis. It was the soul of him that women were trying to possess—that he made clear to me. He has explained it over and over again, but he comes back to it afresh each time like a paranoiac to his obsession. In a sense, Van Norden is mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself.”

SoulFearWomenMadnessPrisonParanoiaThe SoulTropic Of CancerStone Walls Do Not A Prison MakeVan Norden
Book:Tropic of Cancer
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“Maya Angelou spoke of why the caged bird sings and of the courage it takes for literature to crush racism and face trauma. Angelou said the caged bird sings when his wing is bruised and he beats his bars to be free, here’s hoping that every cage be broken through and every bruised wing be healed by the joy of freedom so that it could soar. There are no gardens in prison for the poet to see yet his words make the cage bloom.”

ArtPrisonIsraelWritersFreedom Of SpeechPalestineGazaMaya AngelouWhy The Caged Bird Sings
Author:Aysha Taryam
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“The past is a novel, written by Fate, weaving the same themes: love and its glory, hate and its prisoners, the soul and its price. Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it’s our will alone that leads us to one or the other.”

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Book:The Mountain Shadow
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“It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.”

SacrificeHuman NatureSurvivalPrisonSubmissionFutilityTreason1968
Book:The First Circle
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“Freedom is an essential element for the success and progress of humanity, especially freedom from the restricted imprisonment of certain religions. You never can progress by going backward. Some prisoners have no idea that they are in a prison, because they have been swimming in the same rotten pond for thousands of years. They resist any form of freedom because they fear the freshness of the ocean, they fear freedom. They want to make the whole world a prison, where they will feel comfortable.”

HumanityFreedomKindnessProgressComfortOceanEmpathyPrisonResistance
Author:Debasish Mridha
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“[Imprisoned Poem] Somewhere deep inside me There lies an imprisoned poem A poem that is Buried Chained And holding its breath Ages ago… A poem about futility The fragility of words About alarms, if sounded, They’d be either destined to silence Or get written on the walls of indifference… There is an ancient poem Imprisoned in my soul Waiting to be released impatiently, In due time… Like a house cat this imprisoned poem keeps eagerly watching Every move outside the window, Without any participation… And like a house cat, Whenever this imprisoned poem Gets exhausted by the triviality of reality, It sleeps for long hours Only to wake up and find The status quo unchanged And the strings moving the puppets uncut… It then looks out the window in sorrow And goes back to sleep once again To dream of a less ugly world… My imprisoned poem has vowed not to release itself From the deepest points in my soul Until everyone else is awake For its release to be meaningful… (November 17, 2014)”

HumanityPrisonUnityFutilityArabic PoetryCollective ConsciousnessArabic LiteratureCollective ActionThe Power Of Words
Book:أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]
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“Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips--it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.”

PrisonSmileMoonlight
Book:The Bostonians
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“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”

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Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“You're back where you swore yourself you wouldn't be The familiar shackles you can't tell from your own skin Your head's under water when you learned to swim On a road to hell, congratulations, you're free...”

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Author:Sanhita Baruah
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“I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way – but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn’t hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...”

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Book:City of Paradise
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“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.”

SufferingRaceCompassionEmpathyRacismPrisonAfricaMarxismVictimsJewsPlantationsInternationalismAfricansEuropeansRosa LuxemburgJewish QuestionDh LawrenceMathilde VerneRootless Cosmopolitanism
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.”

SufferingSorrowPrison
Book:Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
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“Imagine the thoughts of serial killer and mutilator Jeffrey Dahmer when he ended up in prison. He felt great remorse, which he confessed on several occasions. He had ruined his life beyond repair. If Wisconsin had the death penalty, he would have earned it. Who could he turn to except God? Certainly no human would hear the cries of his heart and believe the depth of his sorrow. Only God could.”

GodSufferingFaithChristianityForgivenessPrisonConversionRemorseJeffrey Dahmer
Book:Dark Journey Deep Grace: Jeffrey Dahmer's Story of Faith
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“I Feel like a prison holding myself, bounded by the judgements of people I care and chained by the rules of the society I live in. If I would let the person who speaks inside me out, he would tell you a different story than what you have seen all these years. Sometimes I see myself crying, screaming and trying to tear myself into pieces when I stand in front of the mirror so that I could finally be free from myself. But the demons I have created inside me to guard beats me down and laughs at me, watching me bleed.”

CarePrisonScreamFreeDemonsChainedWatchCageHoldBeatGuardBleed
Author:Akshay Vasu
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“Inmates would overwhelmingly welcome segregation. As Lexy Good, a white prisoner in San Quentin State Prison explained, “I’d rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race.” He said it was the same outside of prison: “Look at suburbia. . . . People in society self-segregate.” Another white man, using the pen name John Doe, wrote that jail time in Texas had turned him against blacks: '[B]ecause of my prison experiences, I cannot stand being in the presence of blacks. I can’t even listen to my old, favorite Motown music anymore. The barbarous and/or retarded blacks in prison have ruined it for me. The black prison guards who comprise half the staff and who flaunt the dominance of African-American culture in prison and give favored treatment to their “brothers” have ruined it for me.' He went on: '[I]n the aftermath of the Byrd murder [the 1998 dragging death in Jasper, Texas] I read one commentator’s opinion in which he expressed disappointment that ex-cons could come out of prison with unresolved racial problems “despite the racial integration of the prisons.” Despite? Buddy, do I have news for you! How about because of racial integration?' (emphasis in the original) A man who served four years in a California prison wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times called “Why Prisons Can’t Integrate.” “California prisons separate blacks, whites, Latinos and ‘others’ because the truth is that mixing races and ethnic groups in cells would be extremely dangerous for inmates,” he wrote. He added that segregation “is looked on by no one—of any race—as oppressive or as a way of promoting racism.” He offered “Rule No. 1” for survival: “The various races and ethnic groups stick together.” There were no other rules. He added that racial taboos are so complex that only a person of the same race can be an effective guide.”

RaceDiversityPrisonIntegrationSociologySegregationMarxismRehabilitation
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“The cacophony of county jail is deafening: That's what hap- pens when you jam thousands of women into concrete rooms that were intended to house a population half our size. We sleep in bunk beds in the common areas, feet away from the tables where we play cards and read all day. We urinate in overwhelmed toilets that clog and overflow. We stand in lines for showers, meals, hair- cuts, telephones, meds. At all hours of the day and night, the con- crete echoes with screams and prayers and tears and laughter and curses. There is nothing to do here but wait. I mill around the common room in my canary-yellow prison suit, watching the hands of the clock in the cage on the wall slowly ticking away the minutes of the days. I wait for mealtime, though I have no interest in eating the gray slurry that slides around tray. I wait for the library cart to come around, so I can pick out the least offensive romance novel on offer. I wait for lights-out, so that I can lie in my upper bunk in the semi-dark, listening to the snores and whispers of my fellow inmates while I wait for sleep to come. my It hardly ever does. But mostly, I wait for someone to come help me.”

WaitingPrisonIsolationJail
Book:Pretty Things
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“Spring bloomed- the air gentle and scented with roses. Still lovely. But there were the front doors he'd sealed me behind. There was the window I'd banged on, trying to get out. A pretty, rose-covered prison. But I smiled, head throbbing, and said through my tears, 'I thought I'd never see it again.' Tamlin was just staring at me, as if not quite believing it, 'I thought you would never, either.”

TearsPrisonSarah J MaasFeyreFeyre ArcheronA Court Of Mist And FuryTamlinRosesSpring Court
Book:A Court of Mist and Fury
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“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.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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