Jack Henry Abbott Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing is over and done with. Nothing. Not even your malice.

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.

I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

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

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

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.

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

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

The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.

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