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

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.

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.

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers.

Because ultimately only the witness -- and not the actors -- knows the truth (Vyasa to Draupadi)

We have got to extend the hand of friendship, we have got to take the peacelines down brick by brick

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.

At cheaper and nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest.

In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power.

I think I'm a mama's boy who wanted to be a hockey player, who failed, and had to become a singer. I think that I'm a generous, impatient, kind, jerk.

I am extremely grateful. And that brings me back to reality on the days I am complaining about something.