Life In Jail Quotes & Sayings

Look, this boy's been kicked around all his life. You know-living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That's not a very good head start. He's had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That's all. — Reginald Rose

I was watchin' the news the other day, and I heard them talking about a criminal named Brian Regan same spelling and everything. He's gonna be in jail for the rest of his life. So I'm sitting there doing a crossword puzzle and all of a sudden I hear, It is unknown whether the charges against Brian Regan will lead to his execution. Guess I can put this down. Honey, did we pay that parking ticket?! — Brian Regan

I didn't do anyting wrong. All I know is I saw two people struggling to get inside these walls and they [Minho and Alby] couldn't make it. To ignore that because of some stupid rule seemed selfish, cowardly, and ... well, stupid. If you want to throw me in jail for trying to save someone's [Alby] life, then go ahead. Next time I promise I'll point at them and laugh, then go eat some of Frypan's dinner. -Thomas — James Dashner

Life is singing also in the sand crunching under the slow and heavy steps of the guards, when we know how to listen to it. — Rosa Luxemburg

Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn't see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.

Abdul had kept to himself in his first days at Dongri, aware of his inadequacy in the conversational arts, but the incarceration of the seven-year-olds inflamed him. "What's the use, keeping them here?" he blurted out one day. "You see their faces? So much enthusiasm for life, they are going to break the walls of this jail. The government people should let them work, let them be free. — Katherine Boo

How do you survive for years in prison? You don't think about years, or months, or weeks. You think about today - how to get through it, how to survive it. When you wake up tomorrow, another day is behind you. The days add up; the weeks run together; the months become years. You realize how tough you are, how you can function and survive because you have no choice. — John Grisham

I don't trust anyone that hasn't been to jail at least once in their life. — John Waters

If you haven't said 'I love you' to someone today, do it. You won't always be happy, but you should try to be. Don't be too afraid of germs. Those people have no fun. Remember to look around sometimes. You might see something you haven't seen before or at the very least avoid being hit by a flying object. Speaking of flying objects, don't spend your life looking for extraterrestrial life, unless you work for NASA. Remember that you always have to cooperate with someone. Life is an endless negotiation. Play fair. Stay out of jail. Don't live in the past. Eat breakfast. It really is the most important meal of the day. Try to make new friends, even when you think you're too old to do that ... And finally, remember this 'Yes' is always a better work than 'no'. Unless, of course, someone has just asked you to commit a felony. — Lisa Lutz

If Barack Obama had come up in a time when the drug war was being waged as intensely as it is now, we probably would never have heard of him. A single arrest could have precluded student loans, resulted in jail time, and completely ruined his life, posing a far greater threat to him than the drugs themselves did, including the risk of addiction to marijuana or cocaine. — Carl Hart

In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a "crime against nature" could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years. — Gay Talese

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever. — Michel Faber

I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes ... I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha! I'm already dead, have been all my life. I've spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built. — Charles Manson

But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime. — Kate Millett

People don't understand that you can actually lose your life going to jail. There's more violence in the jail-house than there is on the streets. — Snoop Dogg

Taking a life, is not worth getting life in prison. — Anthony Liccione

Have you ever been in jail, mate? Whatever you did in your life, nothing can be compared to a single day in jail. — Stefania Mattana

I don't make a point of ending up in jail. But if you try to put your hopes and beliefs for a better life into effect, arrest is sometimes a hazard. — Vera B. Williams

Being that I went to jail and came back, I went through a whole new experience in life. I went from being at the top to back down at the bottom again. In jail, you get stripped of your freedom and everything, so I experienced different things, learned more. — Meek Mill

Hate will cause you to "catch a case". Release yourself from your own personal jail before you are put in the real one for life! It ain't worth it!! — Anita R. Sneed-Carter

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life. — Raymond Chandler

I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely phsycial realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came — Jack Kerouac

Man, she was kissin' you like it was the last kiss of her life. If she kisses like that, I wonder how she--"
"Shut up, Enrique."
"She's gonna ruin you, Alejo," Enrique continues, calling me by my Spanish nickname. "Look at you already, spendin' time in jail last night and cuttin' school to get your motorcycle back. Granted, she's got a buena torta, but is she worth it?"
"I gottta get back to work," I say, my mind whirling with Enrique's words. And as I work under a Blazer for the remainder of the evening, all I want to do is make out with my mamacita again and again.
Yes, she's definitely worth it. — Simone Elkeles

The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE — Eugene H. Peterson

There are very few people who have committed more to the pro-life discourse than Rob has. He's spent time in jail. He has really lived it. He has committed everything he's had to it. If in fact he believes that every human life was sacred, I knew that if he had his conscious awakened, I knew he wouldn't be able to close his eyes to it. — Abigail Disney

Gary Moore is another legendary figure of sheer violence. In prison, Gary has spent most of his adult life inside one jail or another. When, on the odd occasion, he does get out of prison, it doesn't take him long to go on a murderous campaign of total terror. Gary has been charged and stood trial for some three or four different murders. — Stephen Richards

Why do adults have to diminish everything by feeling they need to end meetings with a false positive? It's so selfish. They say it not because they believe it, but because it helps them feel some kind of accomplishment when they walk away. Like they've done their job. But what do they leave behind?
It's like when teachers tell Tyler that he should be a lawyer because he's good at arguing, but meanwhile he can't pass grade nine. No one wants to say he's stupid, or that he's probably going to end up in jail like his brother, so they fill his head with these stupid dreams until he's eighteen, with no credits and totally messed up for life. I say, tell the truth, squash the dream, and stop with the second chances. — Lesley Anne Cowan

If you believe in anything very strongly
including yourself
and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house on the block, according to what you started after. If you don't believe in anything very strongly
including yourself
you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son, and you marry if you've got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die. If you're in the second of these two classes you have the most fun before you're twenty-five. If you're in the first, you have it afterward ... if you're in the first class you'll frequently be called a darn fool
or worse. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder.
Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in?
The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did.
The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us. — Nova Ren Suma

I am a veteran, I fought in a war. I've been a prosecutor. I've sent people to jail for the rest of their life. — John F. Kerry

That's my life. But I don't glorify violence, and I hate jail. The rap game saved me, man: I've got three children, and I wouldn't even think of putting my hand in somebody's pocket or doing something stupid now. — Black Rob

Life is like a dice game; one roll could land you in jail, or cuttin' cake, blowin' kisses in the rice game. — Jay Electronica

When I was 11, I had an episode in my life. I saw my cousin shoot his wife. It wasn't traumatic ... but the shock value. I went back into the apartment to collect some things with my dad, because my cousin was in jail. The bed was all bloody. It was there where she had landed after the bullet. She got a .38 to the face. — Richard Ramirez

I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it. — Ariel Sharon

There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes
when I walk through the prison yard, I'm walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they're inspecting troops. — Philip Zimbardo

When you maintain bitterness and contempt towards someone, you're actually binding yourself to them. You've given them a foothold in your life with an emotional connection that is stronger than any prison cell. It's a jail sentence of solitary anger and animosity. Forgiveness is the ONLY thing that breaks that emotional bond. It's the key that sets you free. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Starting your day with anger is like locking yourself in jail. The outside world is enjoying life, while you're locked in your own frustration. — Ron Baratono

After he was sensibly convicted of the wicked state of his life, and converted, he was baptized into the congregation, and admitted a member thereof, viz., in the year 1655, and became speedily a very zealous professor; but upon the return of King Charles to the crown in 1660, he was the 12th of November taken, as he was edifying some good people that were got together to hear the word, and confined in Bedford jail for the space of six years, till the act of Indulgence to dissenters being allowed, he obtained his freedom, by the intercession of some in trust and power, that took pity on his sufferings; but within six years afterwards he was again taken up, viz., in the year 1666, and was then confined for six years more, when even the jailor took such pity of his rigorous sufferings, that he did as the Egyptian jailor did to Joseph, put all the care and trust in his hand: — John Bunyan

Sometimes people have sympathized with me because long years of my life were spent in jail and in exile. Well, those years ... were a mixed experience. I hated them because they separated me from the dearest thing in the world-the struggle of my people for rebirth. At the same time, they were a blessing because I had what is so rare in this world-the opportunity of thinking about basic issues, the opportunity of examining afresh the beliefs I held. — Sukarno

My homies hold me down, really. I talk to Baby, Jeezy, Rozay, Nicki, everybody, from jail. Just call once in a while and holla at people like, 'Yo what's up? What's life like out there?' for people to give me a report of what's going on. — Meek Mill

In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of "Our Song." The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is "like the most subtle hello." Ramamani's voice is the response to this call; it is Laurie's hand reaching for her husband's as they listen. Ramamani tells us not only what it is like to love, but also what it is like to be loved. When I hear her voice, darling, I feel your hand in mine. — Geoff Dyer

A prisoner should know that there are thousands of imprisoned freemen living in this world ... jailed in their own society, handcuffed by duties.. — Munia Khan

One learns a good deal in the school of suffering. I wonder what would have happened to me if I had had an easy life, and had not had the privilege of tasting the joys of jail and all it means." ~ Badsha Khan, quote in Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, p. 87 — Eknath Easwaran

Hey," the other said, coming to life. "You're supposed to be in jail."
Al grinned at him, his white-gloved grip tightening on the wooden handle, which was intricately carved in the shape of a naked, writhing woman. Nice. "And your momma wanted you to have a brain," he said, yanking the door open and slamming it into the guy's face. — Kim Harrison

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death - then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don't you see, this is just the point - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful. — Boris Pasternak

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail):

...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188) — Wayne Greenhaw

Was it last month or last year
that the ambulance ran like a hearse
with its siren blowing on suicide -
Dinn, dinn, dinn! -
a noon whistle that kept insisting on life
all the way through the traffic lights?

I have come back
but disorder is not what it was.
I have lost the trick of it!
The innocence of it!
That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat
with his fiery joke, his manic smile -
even he seems blurred, small and pale.
I have come back,
recommitted,
fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,
held like a prisoner
who was so poor
he fell in love with jail. — Anne Sexton

When I first started out in music, I was so negative. I was knee-deep in the streets. Then my friends started going to jail. They said, 'Boy, you better start taking this seriously; you got a chance to do something with your life.' That's when I realised I had to focus. The music led to the acting. — Ice-T

We should protect our legacy of a free church in a free state. We ought to pray and work for a "quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" (1 Tim. 2:2 kjv). But that is not the ultimate sign of our success. It is better for our future generations to be willing to go to jail - for the right reasons - than to exchange the gospel of the kingdom for a mess of Esau's pottage. Sometimes jails filled with hymn-singing, letter-writing, gospel-preaching Christians can do extraordinary things. — Russell D. Moore

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous! — Salvador Dali

The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever. — Max Horkheimer

And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells. — Italo Calvino

The young man regained consciousness in the ambulance, but his mother insisted that he give no evidence to the police because, had he done so, her lover would have gone to jail: and she was most reluctant to give up a man who was, in his own words to the young man's 11-year-old sister, 'a better f - k than your father.' A little animal pleasure meant more to the mother than her son's life; and so he was confronted by the terrifying realisation that, in the words of Joseph Conrad, he was born alone, he lived alone, and would die alone. — Theodore Dalrymple

If it wasn't for my sport and my father, I'd probably be a fallen statistic. I'd be dead; I'd be in jail. Luckily, I had a great dad in my life. — Apolo Ohno

Mr. Winston and I had already discussed:
How what I'd done was vile and on par with kicking disabled kittens.
That I was on the path to becoming a criminal and likely would spend the rest of my life in jail giving myself homemade tattoos with a needle and Bic pen.
That the statue was a work of art, and would I dare to ear the arm off the Mona Lisa? He didn't think so.
That I was a disappointment to him, my family, my boyfriend, my fellow students, and likely all of Western civilization. — Eileen Cook

Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.' My mother's version: 'You don't look, you get smash flat like sand dab.' (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)
The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself. — Amy Tan

We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit ... not to prove any final, sociological point, and not event as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented. — Hunter S. Thompson

If you want to throw me in jail for trying to save someone's life, then go ahead. Next time I promise I'll point at them and laugh. — James Dashner

Awkward conversations. They're the heart of the drug trade. The driving force that keeps criminals out of jail is paranoia. You can think you know people, but the truth is, you never know who they're talking to. The life of an outlaw: Around every corner lies a cop. In every basement waits a bust. Every friend is the guy who sells you out to keep his own ass out of jail. Sure, it was rare, but you just never knew.
The result was a series of shorthand and euphemisms so obscure even the pros often weren't sure what they were talking about. Sales became pickups. Pot, ganja, bud, or weed became lettuce, green, happy, herb, smoke... the list went on, and changed from dealer to dealer. — Daniel Younger

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done. — Richard Hugo

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

That truth which you swallow from others will not be yours ... you have to realize truth and work it our for yourself according to your own nature ... All must struggle to be individuals-strong, standing on your own feet, thinking your own thoughts, realizing you own Self. No use swallowing doctrines others pass on-standing up together like soldiers in jail, sitting down together, all eating the same food, all nodding their heads at the same time. Variation is the sign of life. Sameness is the sign of death. — Swami Vivekananda

I've never been arrested in my life. Never had cuffs put on me, never been charged with a crime, never spent one day in jail. — Jesse Ventura

After they stopped torturing him they locked him in the jail cell again and pretended they would forget him ... Then, eventually, and unexpectedly, release. Into ignominy, oblivion, married life. — Salman Rushdie

When a man rapes a woman, he doesn't just rape her. He rapes her entire life. She's forced "to live a life with the pain from that memory for a lifetime. And for that judge to send a message that six months in county jail is a fair trade for what happened to that woman?..."I'd like to get my hands on that judge and that kid. .....

"I can forgive a lot of things. Rape isn't one of 'em. — Scott Hildreth

When I was younger, I didn't have the finer things in life. It was around me - the cars, the jewelry and all of that. But I didn't have it. So I did bad things to get what I wanted. Going to jail never crossed my mind. I wish it had. When I was locked up, my mother didn't support me because she couldn't accept who I was and where I was. — Larenz Tate

There wasn't any single moment of bedazzling revelation, it was more of an education process. The more I learned about the nature of addiction, the more I was willing to look at my own behavior and history. And the more I was able to help the people I was in there with, the more it all made sense. A lot of this process came through witnessing the sickness of these people I was in rehab with, for me to see these people and care about them, and to know how slim their chances were of ever changing the demonic possession they had been living with. I realized this was not the jail I wanted to live my life in. — Anthony Kiedis

The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited. — Charles Bukowski

The Don looked around his cell, including the naked 30 year-old woman sprawled in his bed and steaming bowl of Mussels Marinara sitting in front of him. He was always famished after sex and couldn't envision a life on the outside that would limit all of the things he loved to do. In a way, being on the outside would be like going to jail for Don Vito. — Phil Wohl

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral. — Damien Echols

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail ... and I'd never heard it before in my life. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI's intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight. — Charles Brandt

You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm's way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can't. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that's for sure. For heaven's sake, the best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That's why it's the wrong thing to ask, if you're really trying to make a decision."
So what's the right thing to ask?"
Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all's said and done, end up with a good friend. — Barbara Kingsolver

If football wasn't a part of my life, there were three things that could have happened, and they were all bad. I would have likely been selling drugs, in jail or dead. — Chad Ochocinco

Your best friend is the person who not only knows all the important stories and events in your life, but has lived through them with you. Your best friend isn't the person you call when you are in jail; mostly likely, she is sitting in the cell beside you. — Irene S. Levine

You know, don't tell anybody I'm a jail bird, you know, but there were a bunch of us that were years ago involved in the pro-life movement. — Todd Akin

I am satisfied with everything in my life. Including the fact that I spent time in jail. — Ivan Slavkov

What difference would it make? I won't destroy you. If I take you in, you'll be miserable. You'll spend your life never knowing who I am or what I do. You'll have to accept that I may go to jail for years, and you can't leave me, even then. It won't be tolerated. But even me in jail is the better scenario." "And the worse one?" "You learn to tolerate me. — Pepper Winters

I couldn't stand by and watch you put yourselves in harm's way. No way. And fuck those SAVAK bastards, and their Western masters, and the grand servant of the West. Fuck anyone who wants to put me in jail because I stood by my friends to mourn the death of a hero, screw them all. I don't care if I have to spend the rest of my life behind bars, I don't, I really don't. I learned today that friendship is worth making sacrifices for. Doctor proved that life is a small price to pay for your beliefs. — Mahbod Seraji

I haven't even known for a week! I found out who I was the day after the ball, when I was sitting in a jail cell preparing to be handed over to Levana like a trophy. So between breaking out of prison and running from the entire Commonwealth military and trying to save your life, I haven't had much time to overthrow an entire regime. I'm sorry if I've disappointed you, but what do you want me to do? — Marissa Meyer

Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own. — Anna Quindlen

You know, if you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that's fundamentally wrong. — Elizabeth Warren

That's a real void in my life. I see a lot of people who struggled and went to jail and the dogs were after them. I'd look them in the eyes and say, 'God almighty, I wish I'd have been there.' — Ernie Banks

For me-it was better to work in a jail than to live in one. — Brenda Kay Winters

1. Never forget
"they" are always the enemy.
2. Just remember, assholes are born that way, and they usually don't change.
3. You don't want to go to jail.
4. When you start to take this job seriously, you're in trouble.
5. It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.
6. If you decide to run the ball, just count on fumbling and getting the shit knocked out of you a lot, but never forget how much fun it is just to be able to run the ball! — Jimmy Buffett

Suppose ... burglars had made entry into this ... [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress. — Mark Twain

How great a life is this? To get to knock guys' heads off for 60 minutes and not get thrown in jail? — Brian Urlacher

Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we'd already lost Minka Dinnerman, as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who'd left us behind. — Hannah Pittard

One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point. — Christopher Hitchens

Most people figured I'd be in jail. I've been proving people wrong my whole life. — Gary Sheffield

What I learned in jail is that I can't change. I can't live a different lifestyle - this is it. This is the life that they gave and this is the life that I made. — Tupac Shakur

When someone is afraid, his life is worse than the life of someone who is in jail — Sunday Adelaja

I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. — Earl B. Russell

When a child is born in a jail and during their life all they know is the jail they were born into, the idea of freedom becomes so terrifying that they ridicule the very thought of being free, as a clinical illness. It is nothing like the song that a caged bird sings. — Alejandro C. Estrada

If anything's going on in our lives, we have each other. One time, I was having a bad day, and I called Chris Colfer. He came over with a pint of ice cream and Madea Goes to Jail, and it was, like, the best night of my life. — Lea Michele

At this point in the story, I feel obliged to interrupt and give you one last warning. As I said at the very beginning, the book you are holding in your hands does not have a happy ending. It may appear now that Count Olaf will go to jail and that the three Baudelaire youngsters will live happily ever after with Justice Strauss, but it is not so. If you like, you may shut the book this instant and not read the unhappy ending that is to follow. You may spend the rest of your life believing that the Baudelaires triumphed over Count Olaf and lived the rest of their lives in the house and library of Justice Strauss, but that is not how the story goes. — Lemony Snicket

The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless "reforms" that changed little. Dostoevski once said: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people. — Howard Zinn

I resigned myself to the fact that the only way I would get Mishrani out of the movement was to deprogram her. It was a terrifying prospect. There were very real risks that it could go wrong and I could wind up in jail, or worse, Mishrani could end up hating me for the rest of her life.

There was no way around it, though. It was a thing that needed doing, and I was just the guy to do it. — Bhakta Jim

A few years ago I lost one of my dearest friends. He died at age 53 - heart attack. David is gone, but he was one of my very special friends. I used to say of David that if I was stuck in a foreign jail somewhere accused unduly and if they would allow me one phone call, I would call David. Why? He would come and get me. That's a friend. Somebody who would come and get you. — Jim Rohn

If this were a book written to entertain small children, you would know what would happen next. With the villain's identity and evil plans exposed, the police would arrive on the scene and place him in a jail for the rest of his life, and the plucky youngsters would go out for pizza and live happily ever after. But this book is about the Baudelaire orphans, and you and I know that these three unfortunate children living happily ever after is about as likely as Uncle Monty returning to life. — Lemony Snicket

Howie was unburdened with human ties or responsibilities. He bounced around from one loser job to another, his adult life spent in and out of trouble, jail and the workhouse without a care in the world. Howie — Dennis Carstens