Living In Prison Quotes & Sayings

Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego — Rajneesh

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. — Margaret Atwood

Pema calls these activities "the six ways of compassionate living": generosity, patience, discipline, exertion, meditation, and prajna, or wisdom. The basis for all these practices is the cultivation of maitri, an unconditional loving-kindness with ourselves that says, "Start where you are." In Buddhist terms, this path is known as bodhisattva activity. Simply put, a bodhisattva is one who aspires to act from an awakened heart. In terms of the Shambhala teachings, it is the path of warriorship. To join these two streams, Pema likes to use the term warrior-bodhisattva, which implies a fresh and forward-moving energy that is willing to enter into suffering for others' benefit. Such action relates to overcoming the self-deception, self-protection, and other habitual reactions that we use to keep ourselves secure - in a prison of concepts. By gently and precisely cutting through these barriers of ego, we develop a direct experience of bodhichitta. — Pema Chodron

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. — Eugene V. Debs

Today is a new day! Let today be the day you free your mind from the prison of self doubt. Your thoughts can either hinder you or propel you to the next level. Precautions are necessary to maintain your safety and well-being. But fear and precautions are two different things. When you are afraid your doubt is increased. Do what makes you happy in order to satisfy the core of your existence.
Fear: to be afraid of something or someone whether the threat is real or imagined
Precaution: a measure taken in advance to prevent something from happening, prudent foresight
Doubt:a feeling of uncertainty or lack of conviction — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

She'd been living in a prison since the day she'd been born, even after leaving her mother, a prison of fear and shame and lowered expectations, and she'd been so accustomed to her circumscribed life that she had not recognized the bars. — Dean Koontz

Think about it - one in every 37 adults. There are probably more than 37 adults in your apartment building or on your block. We could infer from this study that at least one of the people on your block probably has spent time in prison, if it were not for a sad quirk in the system: many convicted people's lives are so ruined by prison that later, they are not able to live in a decent neighborhood. They can't get jobs, and they have emotional and family problems. So, too often, they end up living a twilight-zone existence in neighborhoods that most of you have been fortunate enough to avoid. — Elaine Halleck

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile. — Laurie Penny

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. "They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday," Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor's hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor's hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free. — Marisha Pessl

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. — James Baldwin

When a man does not realize his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, then is he emancipated, for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with the all is established. In India men are enjoined to be fully awake to the fact that they are in the closest relation to things around them, body and soul, and that they are to hail the morning sun, the flowing water, the fruitful earth, as the manifestation of the same living truth which holds them in its embrace. — Rabindranath Tagore

For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [ ... ] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait.
Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too. — Fernando Pessoa

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. — Albert Einstein

Nobody objected to live in prison
if already felt comfortable living in it. — Toba Beta

Humanity suffers because most of us are living in our prison of fixed, false beliefs and we don't want to get out of it. — Debasish Mridha

But I have a flash of Good News from the Police Atrocity front, which is heating up in Denver. ... Stand back! Good News is rare in the Criminal Justice System, but every once in a while you find it, and this is one of those times. To wit: the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has formally entered the Appeals trial of young Lisl Auman - the girl who remains locked up in a cell at the Colorado State Prison for the Rest of Her Life with No Possibility of Parole for a bogus crime she was never even Accused of committing. She is a living victim of a cold-blooded political trial that will cast a long shadow on Denver for many years to come. Lisl is the only person ever convicted in the United States for Felony Murder who was in police custody when the crime happened. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in. — Bill Hicks

Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth - that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me. — Winnie Holzman

Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and throughly worth living. — Terry Pratchett

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? ... The vice president has two duties: One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate .. the other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared with living a good part of time in the state of Arizona. — John McCain

To accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers' rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. — Noam Chomsky

As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned. — Ingeborg Bachmann

Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear.
Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating.
Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it. — Jaeda DeWalt

We walked in the door, and I was stunned by the sterile emptiness of the place. Most of the tiny living room was taken up by one of those giant strength-building home gyms you see on TV. In addition to that, there was one metal folding chair, an old wooden end table (being used as a coffee table, in front of the one chair), and a TV sitting on a milk crate. And it was the cleanest bachelor pad I had ever seen.
Wow. Nice place. The prison cell motif is really working for you. Very feng shui. — Marie Sexton

The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself believed in it. Besides, though faintly (and themselves unable to explain why), they felt that this faith defended their cruel occupations. If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience. The inspector was such a kind-hearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith. — Leo Tolstoy

People tend to consider beig vulnerable a bad thing. It's not. Vulnerability reminds us that we're human. It keeps us open to giving and receiving love. Without at least a little, we can become someone living n a prison of our own making, where the walls are so thick that no one can get in or out. — Jodee Blanco

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? — Colson Whitehead

Golden bars make no less a prison
than a coffin on a hill.
And in caged reformation,
one wanders aimless still.
The rafters now a recollection
of sacred suppression.
How the morning dawn
strikes mourning confession.
Now Death yields a harvest
of the living masses.
We walk toward its path
no earthly power surpasses. — Craig Froman

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. — Gavin Maxwell

I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life. — M. J. Hyland

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair. — Clarence Darrow

Too many people are living in a prison that they have themselves manufactured. — Michael Beckwith

Every place you don't want to be at feels like a prison. And we have so many desires, expectations and go back to the past and think about the future so often, that I can safely say that we live in such a prison all the time.
So each time you wish you were somewhere else right now is another solid wall you build and thus make this imaginary building even stronger. — Lidiya K.

Don't let people supervise your life, If you know who you are, you shouldn't be living in that prison of dominance, live by your orders, you are your own soldier. — Michael Bassey Johnson

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors! — Nellie Bly

Change comes, when every person is adequately benefited.
We keep hearing about "change." Change will never come to all of society. Change can only come when the market system adequately provide all of the needs for all people. Millions are living in poverty in the United States and throughout the world, due to "change" passed them by, are struggling: Among them are high unemployment, the mentally challenged, poor education, many of them are homeless and hungry, sick and tired; such individuals, look for ways to move beyond their prison walls that hold them back from moving forward: Through the corridors of their prison, they observe the wealthy getting wealthier. They see the market system passing them at a fast rate of speed. Hope has long left the majority of them. There is a price that must be paid for the sins of those who have built these prisons. — Ellen J. Barrier

In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. Stoicism — Piper Kerman

Yes, I am scared of prison. It's the last thing if you are after building up a business over 38 years and you are approaching your 66th birthday and you never owed a man a penny and you feel hard done by and you try to protect yourself and your family and go to prison - if that is the society we are living in, I am happy to accept that. — Sean Quinn

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for not playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and doing noting for his livelihood. In the next cell, was another man, who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without a licence; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the Stamp-office. — Charles Dickens

In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries ... The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan
in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan
shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US. — Ha-Joon Chang

Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he's done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers' counter. Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison. — Dean Koontz

If you've been running a business for 38 years, you're approaching your 66th birthday, you've never owed a man a penny or done anyone any grievance in your life, and you feel hard done-by and try to protect yourself and your family, but go to prison, well if that's the society we're living in, I'm happy to accept that. — Sean Quinn

According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like this: In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. — Piper Kerman

I feel like I'm living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming, can't visit relatives, can't get a job, can't have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison. — Candy Darling

Deep down I know, of course, that I no longer need to lose myself in fantasy because I'm living life at last. But I'll always be thankful for my imagination because I learned long ago that it was my greatest gift: it was the key that unlocked my prison and allowed me to escape, the door through which I entered new worlds and conquered them - the place where I was free. — Martin Pistorius

When the Ripper's murders began in the summer of 1888, there was no such thing as using science in police investigations. Imagine living in a time when a witness claiming to have seen you in the area of a violent crime might be all it takes to bring about your arrest. Maybe you're sent to prison. Maybe you're sentenced to death. — Patricia Cornwell

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. — Ron Brackin

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them. — Gregory David Roberts

So long as you believe yourself to be 'only human' you have accepted life in a prison cell whose door remains locked only by your own mind.
By saying, 'well, I'm only human', you have blindly submitted to all the limitations, fears, pettiness, greed and hatreds which make the common person weak and fragile.
Most never become aware that another way is possible.
You are human, but much more, too.
The much-moreness is the vast, brilliant freedom and power which has confined itself in your humanity.
If you are willing (and not everyone is, which is also a perfectly valid choice), you can begin to explore your native powers and experience freedom within limitation. When you do this, you live fully while you are here and you are no longer afraid to die.
When you are not afraid of death but seek to live in a state of always-discovering, this is when life is transformed and you accept your birthright to choose and create in extraordinary fashion. — Jacob Nordby

Is this not precisely how the universe should look if fantasied by a defiled overmind? Is this not exactly how the universe should be presented if shaped by the careful hand of pure but unforgivingly patient malevolence? Who but the immaculate embodiment of malice would design such a contemptible thing? Indeed, is not the vulgarity of scale proof of an Omnimalevolent Creator, greater even than the finely tuned universe itself? Only a thoroughly corrupted, wicked mind could conceive of such impossible proportions and be in possession of the boorish inclination needed to then dangle such an offense to all reasonableness in front of the eyes of a curious explorer - a tiny, living, thinking organic vessel whom through tuning and coercion the Creator had ensured would one day rise to stare out longingly from the shores of their home-world prison. — John Zande

I was thinking that if I'd had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee. — Sylvia Plath

And in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, not only our psychological state, but living conditions generally in the prison became much more severe. Even food was much scarcer. At that time, they would bring in vats full of greasy water with some vegetables floating in it - potatoes, pumpkins, yams - frequently dirty and rotten, at that. We found out from men working in the kitchen, who belonged to Circular 4, that one hundred pounds of foodstuffs per day were allocated for the six thousand prisoners on Isla de Pinos - that worked out to less than a pound for every fifty prisoners. And that was the extent of our food. The bread had not a drop of fat or lard in it, just salt, and not always that. Its texture was so rubbery that you could stretch it out to more than a third longer without breaking it. — Armando Valladares

Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic. — C.S. Lewis

Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It's been the breaker of many a man's dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence. — Stephen Richards

Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak...Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like an eager altar boy. On fine evenings, when she sat on the back porch between the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to recall the faces of all the cooks she had known. It made her life seem rich. — John Cheever

Living in the land of, "What if ... ?" leads to emotional paralysis. It sets the stage for doom and gloom thinking. It prevents us from experiencing the beauty of the present moment. Happiness resides in the here and now. It can not thrive in a prison of the past or in the worry of future outcomes that may or may not, happen. We need to trust that we have the divine wisdom within ourselves and through the support of others, to climb the treacherous terrain this human existence brings. It is worth the struggle. The view from the top is extraordinary. Onward and upward! — Jaeda DeWalt

Tapping Into the Spring A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. - ALBERT EINSTEIN — Pema Chodron

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. — Michelle Alexander

Come, then, thou regenerate man, thou extravagant prodigal, thou awakened sleeper, thou all-powerful visionary, thou invincible millionaire,
once again review thy past life of starvation and wretchedness, revisit the scenes where fate and misfortune conducted, and where despair received thee. Too many diamonds, too much gold and splendor, are now reflected by the mirror in which Monte Cristo seeks to behold Dantes. Hide thy diamonds, bury thy gold, shroud thy splendor, exchange riches for poverty, liberty for a prison, a living body for a corpse! — Alexandre Dumas

Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully. — Tara Brach

In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England; This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial on adequate grounds for which do not presently exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape. [King Charles I was in prison at the time]. — Oliver Cromwell

Most of us are living in a prison of our fixed, false beliefs and never try to find the door to get out to see and feel the beauty of life, even when the door is wide open and welcoming. — Debasish Mridha