Quotes About Imprisonment

Rose spoke up softly beside me. 'It's how you handle the unfairness of life -that's what matters, I think.'...In this city of imprisonment, I had seen faith and optimism, strength and fortitude in the face of adversity.

Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody "identified" me . . . and whispered in my ear . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can."

I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?

Yet though there is no visible barrier I know only too well that I am surrounded by unseen and impassable walls which tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.

Imprisoned within the impassable walls of the locked, lifeless polar world, all that is left for her is a deathly cold isolation, numbing her senses and freezing her brain. The world lost, the light lost, the mind lost, the coldly gleaming, relentlessly moving ice has become her sole and final reality.

The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour.

Once, back then, a young riverman had even publicly cursed the camp. He was immediately arrested and locked up in the camp for several weeks so that he saw firsthand what was going on inside there. When he got out, he looked strange and didn't answer a single question people asked him. He eventually found work on a barge, and later, his relatives said, he moved to Holland for good—a story that astounded the entire village back then.

Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help - this life after death?

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

Imprisoning convicted criminals for longer and longer periods sounds like an appealing and commonsense proposal to many people. After all, when lawbreakers are locked up they can't commit more crimes and law-abiding citizens are safer. Right? Actually, wrong.

I used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers

Sometimes she speaks of 'the past' as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience.

Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

Beside my pain, all other pains seem false or insignificant. They are the pains of happy people or of people who are alive enough to complain. Mine is the pain of someone imprisoned in life, cut off …

Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And

To belong to something — that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

And the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it. I take comfort in these reflections, since I can't take comfort in life.

Seré siempre el que esperó a que le abrieran la puerta, junto a un muro sin puerta

Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.

Pasar de los fantasmas de la fe a los espectros de la razón es solamente cambiar de celda.

I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

One of my favourite books of all time is 'The Borstal Boy.'

I am jailed, with around 200 other inmates, in a wide hall that looks like a warehouse.