Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

Sometimes you just have to jump in a mud puddle because it's there. Never get so old that you forget about having fun.

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic, " Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

It is my business as a Sunday school teacher to instill a divine discontent for the ordinary. Only the best possible is good enough for God. Can you say, 'God, I have done all that I can?

but darling if he loved you, would he want to see you cry?

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

I move through the third world, my third eye's the guiding light / Invite the fight, we all die tonight

I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.