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

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.

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.

Women are women…How can they ignore their bodies, their looks, and above all, their dresses!

One of the most powerful lessons silence teach us is to ponder

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

A man of bad character punishes his own soul.

Even the most straightforward of paths could turn out to be more complicated than it seemd at first.

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

I don't think I'm a very good businessman. I act too much with my heart.

I would [call myself a feminist], yes, I believe in the unadulterated advancement of women. And we have so far to go still.