Imprisoned Quotes

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud. ~ Chris Gardner

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control. ~ Kenan Malik

1891-1892 Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles. 1883 The New Colossus by EMMA LAZARUS, written to raise funds to complete the Statue of Liberty ~ John Jakes

The soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body ... for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

All alternatives are open. Choose to be blissful. And then there are people who can be blissful even when they are imprisoned, and there are people who remain miserable even when they are living in marble palaces. It all depends on you. ~ Rajneesh

We had stayed up all night my friends and I beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

I confess my pride. I scream inside: You'd better love this man who's given you not just his nervous system but HIS SOUL. You'd better appreciate it. But they don't. They can't. Imprisoned in vanity and sin, they project their needs onto their hero to save themselves. But a hero- and my Dad isn't one-can't save you; only Christ can. Oh I can be righteous when I get going. ~ Ed Davis

We can never found the soul, just as we can never wound God, but we become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched, even when we have everything we need in order to be happy. ~ Paulo Coelho

Very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor feel that they are really guilty. ~ George Jackson

They told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.
And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me. ~ M T Anderson

I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines in the head. ~ Anna Kavan

So what do you do if you are imprisoned for your race and ethnicity? The message is, Those are your crimes. ~ Sun Yung Shin

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know ~ Chuck Klosterman

He'd imprisoned himself in this castle to rot. He'd cut off all contact with the outside world. And just when he thought he'd burned all his bridges, this woman - this impossible, sweet, foolish woman - arrived, determined to swim the moat. Breach his defenses. Make a home. Stay. ~ Tessa Dare

You Americans. You suppress the body of its desires, and treat the heart as if it is a wild animal to be tamed, so that when those things are awakened in you , they have the strength of ravenous lions, too long imprisoned. ~ Louisa Edwards

You get what you want and you become its slave. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Ashley was imprisoned forever by words which were stronger than any jail. ~ Margaret Mitchell

As long as we continue to be imprisoned within the corrupt and rancid norms of the intellect, it will be more than impossible to experience that which is not of the mind, that which is not of time, that which is real. ~ Samael Aun Weor

The knowledge that I have acquired must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude. ~ Elie Wiesel

There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency. ~ Urban T. Holmes III

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. 'Watch out, be careful, watch.' 'Don't climb trees, don't dirty your dress, don't accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don't learn, you won't need it.' And so the snail's antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And ~ Robyn Davidson

Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne's brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle….Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of the puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order. ~ Carol Gilligan

Now comes the threat of climate crisis - a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion? ~ Al Gore

even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by "the religion of the state," or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as "adulteresses" throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky's books enumerating the sins of the West ~ Sam Harris

People may be constrained in two basic ways: physically, by confining them in jails, mental hospitals, and so forth; and symbolically, by confining them in occupations, social roles, and so forth. Actually, confinement of the second type is more common and pervasive in the day-to-day conduct of society's business; as a rule, only when the symbolic, or socially informal, confinement of conduct fails or proves inadequate, is recourse taken to physical, or socially formal, confinement…. When people perform their social roles properly – in other words, when social expectations are adequately met – their behavior is considered normal. Though obvious, this deserves emphasis: a waiter must wait on tables; a secretary must type; a father must earn a living; a mother must cook and sew and take care of her children. Classic systems of psychiatric nosology had nothing to say about these people, so long as they remained neatly imprisoned in their respective social cells; or, as we say about the Negroes, so long as they "knew their place." But when such persons broke out of "jail" and asserted their liberty, they became of interest to the psychiatrist. ~ Thomas Szasz

Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned. ~ Noam Chomsky

Perhaps most surprising of all, the deposed and imprisoned King Henry was not murdered. This had been the fate of the two Plantagenet kings who had lost their crowns before him: Edward II died while in custody at Berkeley Castle in 1327, while Richard II was killed at Pontefract in 1400, the year following his deposition. Ironically, Henry's survival was perhaps a mark of his uniquely pitiful and ineffectual approach to kingship - for it was much harder to justify killing a man who had done nothing evil or tyrannical, but had earned his fate thanks to his dewy-eyed simplicity. Permitting Henry to remain alive was a bold decision that Edward IV would come to regret. But in 1465 it must have struck the king as a brave and magnanimous act. ~ Dan Jones

The Bible lists in Hebrews 11 the heroes of the faith ... who were tortured, imprisoned, stoned, torn apart, and killed by the sword. They didn't wear designer jeans but went about in animal skins, destitute and tormented. ~ Billy Graham

By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties. ~ Wilhelm Frick

This is the nameless land, they say. To you, who for reasons unknowable glimpse here these words. Good people, do not mistake the terms of the agreement: Do not ask men for the story of the nameless land. Do not move lips and tongue in an imitation of the tongue of the nameless land. Do not treat as men those who are imprisoned in the nameless land. ~ Miyuki Miyabe

Yet after all there is nothing so deceptive as one's outward appearance. The reason of this is that as soon as childhood is past, we are always pretending to be what we are not
and thus, with constant practice from our youth up, we manage to make our physical frames complete disguises for our actual selves. It is really wise and clever of us
for hence each individual is so much flesh-wall through which neither friend nor enemy can spy. Every man is a solitary soul imprisoned in a self-made den
when he is quite alone he knows and frequently hates himself
sometimes he even gets afraid of the gaunt and murderous monster he keeps hidden behind his outwardly pleasant body-mask, and hastens to forget its frightful existence in drink and debauchery. ~ Marie Corelli

Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

In recent years, some of the biggest new drug kingpins can't be successfully prosecuted. The Pablo Escobars of today are coming out of China, and they don't have to worry about being imprisoned by their government. They can operate free and in the clear, within the boundaries of their country's own laws. Whenever a deadly new drug is made illegal in China, manufacturers simply tweak its chemical structure and start producing a new drug that is still legal. Many fentanyl analogues and cannabinoids have been made this way. ~ Ben Westhoff

She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars. ~ Joyce Rachelle

The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I've never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I've became intolerable to myself. I live in the dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me. ~ Clarice Lispector

You're imprisoned within a self that doesn't feel wholly yours...But also, to you that self often feels deeply contaminated."
I nodded.
"But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don't."
"But your thoughts are you. I think therefore I am, right?"
"No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes's philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. 'I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.' Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was. You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less. ~ John Green

When we search for "ourselves" in the eyes of others, we have imprisoned our own-selves in believing that our self-worth is nothing unless others validate who we are. Unless we approve of whom we are, what we are, and what we are capable of doing as an individual, only then we will have released "ourselves" from our own imprisonment. We are in charge of our own life's destiny and what we do and become can only be validated by our accomplishments and failures; not by what others may think of us. ~ Dahveed

the echoes and flashbacks have shown up
again and your melancholy grew more
beautifully that you could see roses in your wrists
and wanted to cut them.
But in this bleak, dull, rattled reality that
imprisoned you, there has been a truth that
always dwelt in your heart. That you'll be
illuminated by the aura of healing once you stop
being selfish! ~ Nesrine BENAHMED

The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community - and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion - when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged. ~ David Graeber

A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right ~ Erich Maria Remarque

She felt as if she were imprisoned in a vault heaped with priceless treasures - an ever-growing hoard that threatened to crush the life out of her. There was no way out, either. The vault was impenetrable and she was far too deeply buried beneath a mountain of time to attract anyone's attention. ~ Michael Ende

There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free. ~ Michelangelo

The morning sun
shines over the prison wall,

And drives away the shadows
and miasma of hopelessness.

A life-giving breeze
blows across the earth.

A hundred imprisoned faces
smile once more. ~ Ho Chi Minh

I don't belong to a church or political party or a group of any kind. I feel that Amnesty International is the most civilized organization in history. Its currency is the written word. Its weapon is the letter; that's why I am a member. I believe in its non-violence; I believe in its effectiveness. Its dignity and its sense of commitment. Its focus on individuals and the concentration and tenacity with which they defend those imprisoned for their ideas has earned it the cautious respect of repressive governments throughout the world. ~ Sting

The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love. Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her - half-teasing, half-tender - of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. ~ Kamila Shamsie

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God's fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page. ~ Hanif Kureishi

They imprisoned Joseph to cage his abilities but God empowered him to manifest his potentials ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

We are imprisoned by the truth we dare not see. We are imprisoned by the questions we dare not ask. ~ Kelley Armstrong

The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh. ~ Steven Pressfield

Beauty is the only human aspect which cannot be captured on any canvas howsoever hard an artist tries. At the most, the undaunted artist can replicate the beauty on paper but what is a replica in comparison to the original! The humbling resemblance can only be respected, not truly adored.
Beauty cannot be imprisoned in the lens of a camera. The images of beauty are a moment of its essence. Beauty cannot be displayed to evoke pleasure for all on a cinema screen. Those are just its imprints, mere illusions of its existence. Beauty cannot be described by words; it cannot be written or read about. There are no suitable words in all the languages of the world, ancient or modern to hold it between a paper and a pen or a script and an eye. Beauty can only be experienced from far, its delightful aroma can only be tasted through one's eyes and its pleasurable sight can only be felt from the soul.
Beauty can only be best described at its origin through a befuddling silence, the kind that leaves one almost on the verge of a pleasurable death, just because one chooses beauty over life. There is nothing in this world to hold something so pure, so divine except a loving heart. And it is the only manner through which love recognises love; the language of love has no alphabet, no words. ~ Faraaz Kazi

What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven? ~ Neil Gaiman

I'm not imprisoned in any one medium. In films I use techniques that are not necessarily what other directors attempt. When I write novels I also use techniques which can run counter to those that a novelist would use. ~ Philippe Claudel

No person can do this or that to keep another from being truly free. We are always free. Even if imprisoned. ~ Leigh LaValle

Ibn Taymiyyah lived poorly. He was imprisoned and threatened. But I have never seen anyone as happy as him. ~ Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

A prisoner is imprisoned by the crime that he has committed. A jailer is imprisoned - in the very same prison - by the employment contract that he has signed. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist William Styron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide:

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. (105) ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself. Hermetically sealed amidst our creations and bereft of those of the
Creation, the world then will reflect only the demented image of the mind imprisoned within itself. Can the mind doting on itself and its creations be sane? ~ Edward O. Wilson

A maiden was imprisoned in a stone tower. She loved a lord. Why? Ask the wind and the stars, ask the god of life; for no one else knows these things. And the lord was her friend and her lover; but time passed, and one fine day he saw someone else and his heart turned away. As a youth he loved the maiden. Often he called her his bliss and his dove, and her embrace was hot and heaving. He said, Give me your heart! And she did so. He said, May I ask you for something, my love? And she answered, in raptures, Yes. She gave him all, and yet he never thanked her. The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask life's mysterious god; for no one else knows these things. She gave him nothing, no, nothing did she give him, and yet he thanked her. She said, Give me your peace and your sanity. And he only grieved that she didn't ask for his life. And the maiden was put in the tower. . . . ~ Knut Hamsun

I must die. I must be imprisoned. I must suffer exile. But must I die groaning? Must I whine as well? Can anyone hinder me from going into exile with a smile? The master threatens to chain me: what say you? Chain me? My leg you will chain
yes, but not my will
no, not even Zeus can conquer that. ~ Epictetus

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art. ~ Terence McKenna

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone. ~ Leonard Peltier

Life is too short to spend another moment imprisoned by the will of another. ~ M.K. Williams

She had gotten it all wrong. She was head over heels in
love with him. She loved him so much her stubborn mind struggled to give in to her heart.
She was constantly struggling inside, lying to herself that she didn't love him. But love isn't
that convenient. Love is wild, our hearts are wild; that's why they spend an entire life time
imprisoned in a ribcage. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

The filaments that connect the qualities and dynamics "inside" prisons to those on the "outside" remind those of us on the outside (or, as one former prisoner said to me, "in the outer prison") that, in spite of real differences, in a profound sense "the prisons are us." Even the most brutal among the imprisoned, as James Gilligan argues in his book Violence (where he draws on years of experience as a prison psychologist in a maximum security facility for violent offenders) are people who are confined there often because of their experience of brutality and terror in home and family, these latter embedded often in the structures of violence that are social, political, and economic in nature. ~ Mark Lewis Taylor

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins. ~ Suzanne Collins

I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if  Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of  God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

What? What's so funny? Some idiot tried to put a stake through your heart, and he didn't even hit the darn thing!"
For which I am grateful. And I am even more grateful that you rescued me. I did not like being imprisoned and in such pain. ~ Christine Feehan

If you're fighting the system, then you're still caught in it. It's not about fighting the system; it's about ceasing to hold it together. Non-cooperation. We cannot be imprisoned without our cooperation. Their power is in our acquiescence. ~ David Icke

Great leaders don't just know the sweet spots of their people. They tap into and unchain the infinite potential imprisoned within their people... ~ Assegid Habtewold

Feeling not okay went hand in hand with deep loneliness. In my early teens I sometimes imagined that I was living inside a transparent orb that separated me from the people and life around me. When I felt good about myself and at ease with others, the bubble thinned until it was like an invisible wisp of gas. When I felt bad about myself, the walls got so thick it seemed others must be able to see them. Imprisoned within, I felt hollow and achingly alone. The fantasy faded somewhat as I got older, but I lived with the fear of letting someone down or being rejected myself. ~ Tara Brach

Even thus imprisoned in an instant, the spirit of man might yet plumb the whole extent of space, and also the whole past and the whole future; and so from behind his prison bars, he might render the universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded of him. Better so, they said, than that he should fret himself with puny efforts to escape. He is dignified by his very weakness, and the cosmos by its very indifference. ~ Olaf Stapledon

We have more 'things per person' than any other nation in history. Closets are full, storage space is used up, and cars can't fit into garages. Having first imprisoned us with debt. Possessions then take over our houses and occupy our time. This begins to sound like an invasion. Everything I own owns me. Why would I want more? ~ Richard A. Swenson

John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances."104 ~ John Zande

Lose your freedom, and become a slave by borrowing. ~ Auliq Ice

When you are imprisoned by the rules of conformity, it tames your imaginative capacity and steals your free thinking abilities. ~ Debasish Mridha

As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented among those arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967 blacks were seventeen times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape, and robbery, according to FBI data. And they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft, and aggravated assault. ~ Jason L. Riley

And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart ... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! ... Indeed, we are but shadows - we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream - till the heart be touched. That touch creates us, - then we begin to be, - thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. ~ Walter Benjamin

Bingley prowled his library like a caged animal. The rain separating him from Jane imprisoned him in the house, creating his own personal hell. His sisters worked themselves into a frenzy over the ball, his brother-in-law consoled himself with increasing amounts of drink, and Darcy stared into space with a small smile on his lips. He wondered if the world had turned upside down if Darcy was the besotted man, smiling too much while he grumbled over every detail. ~ Rose Fairbanks

I thought of myself hanging in the store, as a mote imprisoned on a shaft of sunlight. Pushed and pulled by the slightest shift of air, but never falling free into the tempting darkness. ~ Maya Angelou

He held me much closer than Carl had. His grip was firm and possessive. It left no doubt in anyone's mind who I belonged to and that alone sent a thrill through me that I knew was wrong. He imprisoned me in the unwavering chains of his gaze, leaving me powerless to break away while he scrutinized my soul. I wondered what he was looking for.
"You came."
The hand on my waist slid over the swell in my spine where it connected to the rise of my backside. His palm flattened against the spot and I was drawn even closer, eliminating what modicum of space there had been between us. My soft frame was cradled seamlessly into the unyielding length of his in all the places that counted, thighs, pelvis, stomach … breasts. I couldn't even breathe without feeling the skim of my hardened nipples against his chest. I couldn't move without feeling his cock reaching for me through miles of fabric to prod into my midsection.
He was long and hard and I grew wet from that knowledge alone.
"Gabriel…"
"I couldn't leave without having this dance with you."
My fingers tightened around his shoulder. "Why?"
His quiet exhalation whispered over the curve of my cheeks, smelling of mint and despair. "Because the further away I got from you, the more it felt like if I kept driving, I would lose you for good and that scared me like nothing else. ~ Airicka Phoenix

Do you fast? Then feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the sick, do not forget the imprisoned, have pity on the tortured, comfort those who grieve and who weep, be merciful, humble, kind, calm, patient, sympathetic, forgiving, reverent, truthful and pious, so that God might accept your fasting and might plentifully grant you the fruits of repentance. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher its sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say I would let myself into that "342" and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,indeed, the globe that very same night. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When I saw you, I saw tears of love in your eyes. It tamed my fire of love and imprisoned me in a cage of desires. ~ Debasish Mridha

(To The Youth) ... you know and everybody knows that life has failed to bring the light of hope to my eyes, draw a smile on my face, and create joy in my heart. You know and everybody knows that being tortured for you, being imprisoned for you and suffering for your sake has been the only joy I have ever had ... it is from your joy that I feel comfort, it is your freedom that brings the light of hope to my sight, it is your comfort that I feel relaxed in my heart ... I cannot speak well or write well ... please note the hidden force under my simple lousy words.. please understand ... please understand ! I love you and consider you my only friend; all my life, all the days and nights, every moment of my life is a witness to my love and dedication for you. Your freedom is my doctrine, your success is my affection, your future is my only hope! ~ Ali Shariati

It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence - who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.
But I was always word-smitten. ~ Charles Frazier

One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part. Hence, an impartial group has to come together to investigate and to render an opinion on this very important subject, because the clarification of this issue will contribute to the solution of global problems. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

This one question
"What do I know for certain?"
is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions
things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state. ~ Adyashanti

We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. ~ Mervyn Peake

The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome. ~ Hugh Howey

Take then this Book, look into it, and show me when Jesus was not forgiving. Read this diving tragedy and tell me where He speaks without mercy and compassion. You visit not the sick and the imprisoned; nor do you feed the hungry or give refuge to the stranger or comfort to the mourner. ~ Khalil Gibran

If we are imprisoned in ourselves, books provide us with the means of escape. If we have run too far away from ourselves, books show us the way back. ~ Holbrook Jackson

There is a great risk that Christians may become idolaters if they lose the meaning of silence. Our words inebriate us; they confine us to what is created. Bewitched and imprisoned by the noise of human speech, we run the risk of designing worship to our specifications, a god in our own image. Words bring with them the temptation of the golden calf! Only silence leads man beyond words, to the mystery, to worship in spirit and in truth. Silence is a form of mystagogy; it brings us into the mystery without spoiling it. ~ Robert Sarah

No, my girl, you know nothing of how we women are imprisoned in our lives, but there are ways to determine the sentence we must serve. ~ Gregory Maguire

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him. ~ Harry Lloyd

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit--dumps, mopes, Mondays--all that's dismal--low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like the blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance. ~ William H. Gass

Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned ... I had never been so truly free in my life. ~ Malcolm X