Patricia McConnell Quotes

I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.

Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

I was already a wreck when I went in, and prison nearly destroyed what little was left of me. I was worse when I came out than I was when I went in, and was not positively changed in any way.

One of the principle things life has taught me is that we always have a choice. When we say we "can't," we usually mean we're just not willing to pay the price.

My published works are concrete evidence that I exist.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

People think I'm educated because I talk and write well, but the fact is I never finished high school. I've read a lot, is all.

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

A crisis of confidence is so common that it should be considered a universal part of the adoption process.