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.

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.

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.

Intersections are crash magnets.

You just can't let anything or anyone get in the way of who you are.

You may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future.

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

I don’t like the way he looks at you.” My stomach lurched. “What do you mean? How does he look at me?” “Like you’re not a student and he’s not a teacher.

If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged.

All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.