Sing Sing Prison Quotes & Sayings

Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only
not even primarily
to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power. — Stephen Mitchell

Our cage
We make a quire, as doth the prison'd bird,
And sing our bondage freely. — William Shakespeare

In Sing Sing Prison, in a ghastly white room stands a chair. Its parts are heavy joinings of oak, riveted and screwed together; its strong legs fastened to the floor with teeth and claws of steel. It bites into the marrow of men with fangs of fire. For this is the faldstool of bloody human justice, the prayer-chair of man's vengeance upon man. Into it are strapped ... men who have killed other men. In it, for a high moral purpose, erring human lives are shocked across the barrier into night and the grave. - Edward H. Smith (1918) — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. — W. H. Auden

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

It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history. — Malcolm Forbes

Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency. — Mary Travers

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

The only one interested in hearing your sad story is ... you; and even you wish you didn't have to relive it again! — Guy Finley

The only attribute of a point is that it marks position. Take away this attribute and in the unposited point we have a symbol of pure Being, the abstract noumenon, that which underlies every mode of phenomenal manifestation, every form of existence. It is at once All and Nothing, at once Absolute Consciousness and Unconsciousness. All - since it contains the potentiality of everything, past, present, and to come. Nothing - since having no form, no limit, it is non- existent, quoad nos. It is Consciousness itself, and yet it is unconscious according to our conception of consciousness, for there is nothing beside itself for it to be conscious of - no differentiation of subject and object. That Being must exist — Anonymous

I filmed seven movies in 2011 and I think that was a mistake. I pushed myself too hard and I want to be able to come to work each day and give 100 percent. I guess I found out what my boundaries are. — Anna Kendrick

In order for prisons to truly serve the public, the people who run them would do well to aspire to the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, the storied warden of New York's Sing Sing Prison in the early part of the twentieth century, who vowed, 'We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop. — Piper Kerman

I was just, like, not at all the office type; I was the artist type. — Ana Castillo

What to do now, Father? I am going to die like a killer, and I do not even remember killing."
"You can pray, my son. You are in the hands of God now," said the good priest. — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things. — Matana Roberts

In 1837, New York University erected a Gothic Revival building on the northeast corner of the parade grounds at Washington Square, constructed from stones cut by convicts at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison located about thirty miles up the river in Ossining, New York. The indignant stonecutters of New York's Stonecutters Guild promptly organized New York's first mass labor demonstration in Washington Square, which continued for days. To complete its construction, NYU was forced to call in the 27th Regiment of the National Guard to clear the demonstrators from the site. — James Roman

I wrote 90 percent of the record in prison. A lot of people wonder, "How the hell did you do that?" I just pretty much played drums on my legs with my hands and while I did that, I would hum the guitar parts and sing the melodies of the songs. — Ronnie Radke

Why is the Rockefeller Commission so Single-Minded About a Lone Assassin in the Kennedy Case?, — Cyril Wecht

He could feel himself gliding down like the sail of a weightless craft, forever plunging into the great beyond below where mermaids sing and summon their lovers home, further down into the depths of some complacent serenity, further down where thoughts float away and never return and the lightness is so grand that there is no other worldly place imaginable, for there is no world left to be
considered. There is only the soul, free from the prison of the body, and it is released to travel
another millennium through time, carrying with it the progress and industry gathered from the
mind previously occupied. — Matthew Chase Stroud