Prison Talk Quotes & Sayings

For an introvert, interacting in a group setting does mean missing out. Where there is too much input, the introvert misses his mind, his subjectivity, his freedom, his very potential. The high-stimulus social environment, the "where it's at on a Friday night," this apparent "more," becomes a prison to the introvert. He can't wait to be free - to get out and away from the noise, the talk, the interference with his inner process. — Laurie A. Helgoe

Once the screws left, most of the six or seven boys who had been overpowered by the SAS were not in any fit state to move, never mind talk. In May 1988 Malkie and Sammo and one other boy, whose name escapes me right now, got a total of twenty-seven years between them for mobbing and rioting and assault. — Stephen Richards

That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool, and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me laying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself. — Michael Vick

What matters is what we write: that is what we are, not some puppet made up by those who talk and enclose us in a prison so different from our dreams. — Silvina Ocampo

I'd go to swim practice, put my face in the water, and I didn't have to talk to anybody. Swimming was like my escape, but it was also like this huge prison because I felt like I had to swim up to people's standards. — Amanda Beard

Tommy asks where Carolyn is.
"She's at Cindy's."
"They live together now," Salvador added.
"Didn't they just start dating?" Tommy asked.
Tiger answered, "Yeah... A couple of WEEKS ago."
Unhappy about the news, Tommy objects to Carolyn moving in with Cindy.
"That's how it happens in our WORLD," Salvador said. "One night you MEET, the next night you MOVE IN, and before you KNOW IT- you're digging a GRAVE IN THE BACK YARD FOR YOUR LOVER DURING A FREAK THUNDERSTORM."
"THAT IS HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE," Tommy said.
After Salvador apologizes, Tommy asks how Raven's doing in prison.
"Fucking GREAT." Tiger answered. "How do you THINK?"
"No longer on suicide watch?"
"NO... FUCK..."
"Speaking of fucking. Is he still with BULL DOG?"
"I REALLY don't wanna TALK about RAVEN right now- AND WHO HE'S FUCKING. Talk about INAPPROPRIATE. — Giorge Leedy

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen. — Jimmy Fallon

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

Every time Dani said his name I felt like she was tugging at a thread I wasn't ready to unravel yet. Or maybe that thread was me. "Can we not talk about him?" I said. "Like, ever again?" "You have no idea how long I've been waiting to hear you say that," she sighed. "So anyway, you think you're ready to join the rest of the world today?" I lowered my voice. "You think this prison sentence is self-imposed? My mom freaked out about how long I was asleep and now she's got me on lock down to keep me from — Laekan Zea Kemp

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there's no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I'm bloated with language I can't afford to forget. — Warsan Shire

Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture. — Patricia Engel

Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day. — Michael Connelly

But this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. — G.K. Chesterton

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon. — William Shakespeare

You've got to be willing to look at a guy's face and say I will kill you if I have to. You've got to be willing to look in his face and say that I will stab you, I will hurt you and you can't talk the game, you've got to really act and do the game. Prison is a thing where talking gets you killed. What gets you respect is you do. The guy that you fear is a guy that says nothing. — Bernard Hopkins

What sort of party is this?" Lucy asks, staring at a group of guys who look like they walked off the set of Prison Break.
"The fun kind," Leo says. "Go have some. We'll find you after I talk to my brother."
"The fun kind?" Lucy shouts to Jazz. "I'm pretty sure I saw that guy over there on 'Crime Stoppers' last week." She's right. She did. — Cath Crowley

Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison? — Ian McKellen

How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live - you could see it go out of him - when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away. — Adam Johnson

Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like. — Tony Hillerman

I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing. — Huey Newton

On 'Prison Break,' I tended to talk a lot! They gave me a lot of fun words to say. There were always these great mouthfuls of words that would fall out! — Robert Knepper

In [James Kelman's story] 'The Third Man, or Else the Fourth,' four men stand around a fire, on a freezing day. They appear to be out of work, and very poor. They talk about politics, about an old man who was recently found dead in a cold tenement building, about prison. One of the men, Arthur, starts describing a dream he had. Like most dreams, it is incomprehensible; it gathers pace, and we are drawn into it, and then it fizzles out. Kelman makes a funny, implicit connection between maintaining the fire (the narrator goes off to get "burnables") and maintaining a story: everything is potentially burnable, everything can be used. — James Wood

I'm a golfaholic, no question about that. Counseling wouldn't help me. They'd have to put me in prison, and then I'd talk the warden into building a hole or two and teach him how to play. — Lee Trevino

In prison, I finally got it. Understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools. There would be ceremonies, public apologies, cardboard displays. In the interim, however, I threatened order, threatened civilization. In the interim, I too had to adhere to an unwritten code. — H M Naqvi

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. — Andy Rooney

When the meat platter was passed to me, I didn't even know what the meat was; usually, you couldn't tell, anyway-but it was suddenly as though _don't eat any more pork_ flashed on a screen before me.
I hesitated, with the platter in mid-air; then I passed it along to the inmate waiting next to me. He began serving himself; abruptly, he stopped. I remember him turning, looking surprised at me.
I said to him, "I don't eat pork."
The platter then kept on down the table.
It was the funniest thing, the reaction, and the way that it spread. In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn't eat pork. — Malcolm X

The atmosphere [in the school lunchroom] is not quite that of a prison, because the students are permitted to talk quietly, under the frowning scrutiny of teachers standing around on duty, during their meal-they are not supposed to talk while standing in line, though this rule is only sporadically enforced. — Edgar Friedenberg

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal. — Peter Hessler

I won't talk about what it was like in prison, except to say I'm glad I'm out and that I plan never to go back and to pay my taxes every day. — Richard Pryor

Whattaya mean you ain't no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal. — Kenneth Eade

Prison widens your circle of friends. In my stand-up, I can now talk about things that no one else has the right to touch. — Craig Charles