Quotes from Jack Henry Abbott

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

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

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.

I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.

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

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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

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

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

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.

When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.

There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill.

I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape.

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.

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

I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, I am only human--as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.

The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.

Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.

Sometimes I doubt that anyone with a philosophical turn of mind is fit to judge anyone. He never comprehends the concept of guilt.

To illustrate: to walk ten miles in an enclosed space of ten feet is not really movement. There are not ten miles of space, only time.

The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state caused by the body ... William James described this relationship when he said we become sad because we shed tears: we do not shed tears because we are sad.

Indeed, it is almost a rule that the more simple and commonplace something is, the more difficult it is to understand it.

The wasteland that is your memory now comes under the absolute dictatorship of idols too terrible to mention.

It is funny that some of must not only get our bearings but must also know all the details of the world before we venture out into it.