Prisoner Quotes

Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was for one who had never seen a cell or felt a whip to be a prisoner of the torturers, what dying meant, and death.

I learned that I had been more to her than I had ever guessed, and at last fell into a sleep in which my dreams were all of her. Not memories merely -- memories I had possessed in plenty before. I held her poor, cold hands in mine, and I no longer wore the rags of an apprentice, nor the fuligin of a journeyman. We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters. ~ Gene Wolfe

Just one word, infused with naked desperation; half prayer, half enchantment. It felt like a freezing charm on her soul making her his prisoner, yet setting her free all at once. ~ Genevieve Dewey

Learn from the past, but don't be a prisoner of it. ~ Jamie Larbi

It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. ~ Albert Camus

The fate of all of us here has been to know that we are prisoners of power. No one knows why us in particular, but what a great fortune! ~ Carlos Castaneda

Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to 'a moral choice.' His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free. ~ John Pilger

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. ~ Socrates

I was happy not to be in his place. He could command my death, but not his. But then, what kind of power was his? He was a prisoner of himself. ~ Anchee Min

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

A few days after my new state occupied my village, I became a prisoner of war rather than a citizen. ~ Noam Chomsky

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.' ~ Tom Robbins

That's what it's like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it,
then you feel bare without your chains. ~ Tarryn Fisher

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape. ~ Loren Eiseley

When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart. ~ Howard Thurman

Sometimes, no matter how hard we try for someone and hope that they will get better in time – they never do. Abusive relationships shouldn't have a key to your chambers of heart. Hold your key and keep it close. Don't end up getting addicted to such pain or human beings – for that matter. You might not be Thor but they can surely be Loki & hold you prisoner to their trickster nature. ~ Sijdah Hussain

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf.... ~ Andrei Makine

John McCain was a prisoner of war. ~ Fred Thompson

They ask themselves: "What will he do?" "How will he react?" "Will he go mad?" "Will he bite?" "Will he be armed?" They're pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I'm cool as a cat! The name 'Charles Bronson' causes panic! The name 'Mickey Peterson' causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I'm the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It's a fact. So here I am years later, and I'm still the madman. There is no escaping my past. ~ Stephen Richards

We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her. ~ Marcel Proust

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Love fills everything. It cannot be desired because it is an end in itself. It cannot betray because it has nothing to do with possession. It cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks. Anyone who tries to imprison love will cut off the spring that feeds it, and the trapped water will grow stagnant. ~ Paulo Coelho

The demigods have left for alaska," Stheno said. "They fly straight to their death. Ah, small "d" death, I mean. Not our prisoner Death. Although, i suppose they're flying to him too. ~ Rick Riordan

All were indiscriminately condemned to death; but one out of three only were really executed. Ten cannon were placed on the drilling-ground, a prisoner fastened to each of their mouths, and five times were the ten guns fired, covering the plain with mutilated remains, in the midst of air tainted with the smell of burning flesh. These men, as M. de Valbezen says in his book called "Nouvelles Etudes sur les Anglais et l'lnde," nearly all died with that heroic indifference which Indians know so well how to preserve even in the very face of death. "No need to bind me, captain," said a fine young sepoy, twenty years of age, to one of the officers present at the execution; and as he spoke he carelessly stroked the instrument of death. "No need to bind me; I have no wish to run away." Such was the first and horrible execution, which was to be followed by so many others. At ~ Jules Verne

Darkis pointed toward the dwarf sitting btween them on the ground. "Uh, don't you think that's a bit much?"
Turi and Ethis each held separate ropes around the bound hands and feet of the dwarf. A gag was tied tightly over hi mouth.
Ethis considered the prisoner for a moment before replying. "No, it seems a resonable precaution." "Why? What did he do?" Darkis said. The chimera looked at each other, thier blank faces considering for a moment. "He kept promising not to escape," Thuri answerd at last. "He promised not to escape," Darkis asked, his brow furrowed with the puzzle, "and so you tied him up?"
"He wouldn't shut up about it," Ethis replied, his large eyes blinking indignantly. "He kept going on and on about how we could trust him and how he had nowhere to run and how he was glad it was us who took him as a slave captive of war."
"It was unnerving," Thuri finished. ~ Tracy Hickman

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn't like not having a map for it.
("Wait") ~ Conrad Williams

Since being a prisoner was a definite improvement over being dead, which was what she thought was going to happen when the Loundergs had attacked, Suzy was quite cheerful. ~ Garth Nix

A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow mindedness. ~ Nelson Mandela

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. ~ Angela Davis

Here's how I think of my money - as soldiers - I send them out to war everyday. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there's more of them. ~ Kevin O'Leary

He caught her hand. "What do you want from me, Grace?"
That was easy. "Everything." She wanted to touch his chest, but since he held her hand prisoner, she insinuated one leg between his legs, delighting in what it did to his breathing. "I don't want you to hold anything back. I don't want you to be so careful with me all the time."
"Grace…."
"I want you to give me as much as I can take, and then I want you to give me more."
"Like I did last night?"
His voice was rough, laced with self-disgust. God help her, she'd never loved him more. ~ Norah Wilson

Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible. ~ Ernest Becker

You look as if you would eat me up," he says. "I would," I say. "I cannot think how to sate my desire for you. I think I will have to keep you prisoner here and eat you up in little cutlets, day after day." "If I kept you prisoner, I would devour you in one greedy swallow," he chuckles. "But you would not get out till you were with child. ~ Philippa Gregory

She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past. ~ Anna Quindlen

There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics? ~ Stephen Richards

It's very good of you
"
"No, no, not at all. It's my hobby. Not proposing to people, I don't mean, but investigating things. Well, cheer-frightfully-ho and all that. And I'll call again, if I may."
"I will give the footman orders to admit you," said the prisoner, gravely, "you will always find me at home. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

When you're on the yard, prisoner politics dictate that you only socialize with your own race. If you fraternize with other races, you can get taught a painful lesson. And there are inmates with a level of consciousness who feel it's their duty to enforce this segregation. ~ James Fox

Love is not a word we use. We feel it, we mean it, but we don't say it. It feels so final, a declaration from which there is no easy return. I'm a thief. I know my exits. And I was a prisoner. I hate locked doors. But his eyes are so close, so eager. And it's what I feel. Even though the words terrify me, they are the truth. Didn't I say I would start telling the truth? ~ Victoria Aveyard

I am a prisoner of my skin. My bones are my cage. ~ Dawn Kurtagich

I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201) ~ Pat Conroy

Prisoner of War guard companies, or an equivalent organization, should be as far forward as possible in action to take over prisoners of war, because troops heated with battle are not safe custodians. Any attempt to rob or loot prisoners of war by escorts must be dealt strictly with. ~ George S. Patton

I'm feeling more and more thoughts that aren't songs, just reflections. I'm always been very shy and in some ways a prisoner in one language and I feel that the liberation of creativity has to be in all senses. So I've been deciding to publishing something very simple but very small at the same time, nothing egocentric. ~ Ana Tijoux

They say: misfortunes and sufferings,' remarked Pierre, 'yes, but if right now, right this minute they asked me: "Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through this all again?" For God's sake let me again have captivity and horse flesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our familiar rut all is lost, but that is only when something new and good can begin. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. I say this to you,' he added, turning to Natasha. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy. ~ James C. Collins

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.

Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking. ~ Jesse Cozean

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. "Go ahead, you're free now," the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town. ~ Hampton Sides

When a uniform exercise of kindness to prisoners on our part has been returned by as uniform severity on the part of our enemies,you must excuse me for saying it is high time, by other lessons, to teach respect to the dictates of humanity; in such a case, retaliation becomes an act of benevolence. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay. ~ Stephen Richards

You can never want too much. That's how they silence us," I said. "They told us we were lucky to be in the penal colony instead of the aether. Lucky to be murdered with NiteKind, not the noose. Lucky to be alive, even if we weren't free. They told us to stop wanting more than what they gave us, because what they gave us was more than we deserved." I picked up my jacket. "You're not a prisoner any more, Arcturus." Warden looked at me in silence. I left him in that ruined hall with the music echoing above him. ~ Samantha Shannon

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sade is still a prisoner when he dies, but this time in a lunatic asylum,acting plays on an improvised stage with other lunatics. A derisory equivalent of the satisfaction that the order of the world failed to give him was provided for him by dreams and by creative activity. The writer,
of course, has no need to refuse himself anything. For him, at least, boundaries disappear and desire can
be allowed free rein. In this respect Sade is the perfect man of letters. He created a fable in order to give
himself the illusion of existing. ~ Albert Camus

Since my life as a prisoner has begun I have heard the teachings of the white man's religion, and in many respects believe it to be better than the religion of my fathers ~ Geronimo

In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he. ~ Alexander Pushkin

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
Kicked in the face
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet ~ Neil Peart

We bury our seeds and wait,
Winter blocks the road,
Flowers are taken prisoner underground,
But then green justice tenders a spear ~ Rumi

Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus. ~ Jean Vanier

there are moments when indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner-indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. ~ George Takei

The upperclassman hands over a third pail. "Throw it," commands Bastian. The night steams, the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours the water onto the ground. "I will not. ~ Anthony Doerr

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. ~ Stephen King

Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. ~ Cornel West

I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom. From a response to an offer of conditional freedom, read by Zindzi Mandela at a rally, Jabulani Stadium, Soweto, South Africa, ~ Nelson Mandela

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner. ~ David Chase

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all. ~ Eldridge Cleaver

This will do," said he, "and from this letter, which might have ruined me, I will make my fortune. Now to the work I have in hand." And after having assured himself that the prisoner was gone, the deputy procureur hastened to the house of his betrothed. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Once you are no longer afraid, once you are no longer prisoner to the what-ifs and the if-onlys, there's a pocket of calm in the middle of the craziness. As if you can see things as they really are instead of just how you wish them to be, or how they could be, if this place - this life - wasn't so messed up, so contrary. ~ Gina Linko

As our country bled ... its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners. ~ Corazon Aquino

The Crimson Pirate, The Mark of Zorro, Captain Blood, The Black Pirate, Adventures of Don Juan, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sea Hawk, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, ~ Cary Elwes

What good is it to be rich if we canna scrape up the scratch to buy a political prisoner on a whim? ~ Kresley Cole

He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence. ~ Gilbert Highet

What is it you do for your family? Aside from trying to put it in your sister, I mean? ~ Greg Rucka

When you enter a lake and when the nature wraps you up tightly never letting you go out, you will be the happiest prisoner on earth! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Prison service vans that travel 90 miles to take a prisoner 90 yards; paedophiles free to leer at children in the very parks where they have committed horrific crimes. ~ Trevor Phillips

You aren't meant to be a prisoner. You're powerful and incredible."
"You've no' seen me in dragon form."
"I don't have to. I see the man before me now. ~ Donna Grant

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

Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn't mean you have to think it today. Don't ever become a prisoner of your own opinion ~ Harvey Fierstein

Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime - certainly my own - yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society. ~ Piper Kerman

He was looking through the eyes of the prisoner. ~ Stephen King

My ice-cream is melting just as quickly as Danny's and is dripping down my chin, across my wrist, and onto my thigh. I laugh, throwing my head back and covering my eyes so as not to be blinded by happiness, and it is in this moment of weightlessness that I am suddenly aware of the lightest touch on my skin, like the wings of a butterfly. It flutters against my thigh then lingers on my wrist, but before its delicate wings reach my face, I force my eyes open and see only fragments: pink lips, a tanned cheek, the features and lines of a face silhouetted against the bright sunlight. My nostrils draw in his scent for the very first time and it is so strong that he is not just next to me but intimately close. His smell instantly takes me prisoner, overpowering me to such an extent that I have forgotten who and where I am.
I know that, moments before, Alex was using his lips and tongue to clean the melted ice-cream off my thigh and wrist and inadvertently treating me to the most ecstatic experience of my life. My body and mind are adrift in a sea of bliss, the sounds of the park suddenly fade away, and the world and everyone in it cease to exist. All I can see is a blindingly bright light and all I can feel are a man's moist lips touching mine. Alex's hot, passionate mouth is kissing me greedily as if there is finally enough air; as if he had been suffocating, but now he can breathe.
I know that a kiss like this is neither flirting nor dating and can sense with every fibr ~ Victoria Sobolev

Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering. ~ Rachel Kushner

She needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself. ~ Toni Morrison

Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, "In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, 'Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

Our motto should be: let us make peace so that we can concentrate on the really important work that needs to be done. That is, alleviating the plight of the poor and the defenceless, for as long as most of humanity feels the pain of poverty we all remain prisoners. ~ Nelson Mandela

Jesus said, "Those who do the will of my Father are my brother, sister, and mother." Sometimes I'm surprised by the ones who are doing the Father's will. Sometimes when I'm fighting for justice I see people who don't look like me, believe like me, or vote like me working alongside me. I have learned that just because people say they are Christian doesn't mean they are Christ-like. And just because someone claims to be a Christian doesn't mean they are doing the Lord's work. Jesus said many will say 'Lord, Lord' and Christ will respond, "I never knew you." It is those who feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, welcome the stranger, that will be welcomed into the kingdom of God. Those who work toward a world where the poor are blessed, who make peace, who hunger and thirst for justice, those are the faithful. Those are my brothers, sisters, and mothers. I ~ Shawn Casselberry

Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object that dominates me and devours me (like Judith) in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hands, which I destroy (like Lucrece thrusting home the dagger) without ever succeeding in possessing it. Perhaps, above all, the question for me is to escape this dilemma by finding a way in which the world and myself--object and subject--confront each other on an equal footing, as the matador stands before the bull. ~ Michel Leiris

I'm not an ordinary prisoner. ~ Mikhail Khodorkovsky

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

In August 1914, my father was called to war and then taken prisoner. He died in captivity in Germany on March 27, 1915. My youth - indeed, my entire life - was deeply marked by this, directly and indirectly. ~ Maurice Allais

Forgiveness sets the prisoner free. And realizing that prisoner was you. That's what forgiveness does. It sets you free. ~ Victoria Osteen

I am not a number; I am a free man. ~ Patrick McGoohan

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.

But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.

She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Par for the course when it comes to the Branch. They're always holding people prisoner, and people are always trying to break free. ~ Jennifer Rush

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says. ~ Anna Funder

You feel like a prisoner if you don't create. You're jailed up inside of yourself. ~ Edie Brickell

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was yourself. ~ Diane Moody

I liked sports real well myself. And when I was about thirteen, I thought I knew why. I looked at it this way. God put you in a body, and He made that body subject to a lot of natural laws, you know? Like gravity and stuff. You see, Doc, I was brought up very religious, and I believed in God. And I believed in a soul. And I got to thinking that maybe the soul was like a prisoner in the body. Maybe the soul was too big for the body and was always trying to get out. And sports was - well, according to natural laws, you should only be able to run so fast, right? I mean, you get your legs working, you get your muscles churning as fast as they can go, you take into account the wind against you, stuff like that, all natural and scientific, and then you know just how fast you can go. You see? But me, I figured that there was something inside you, inside your soul, that could make you go just a little bit faster. Just a little bit faster, and it didn't have anything to do with muscles or nature or anything. It was your soul doing it. And when your soul made you go just that little bit faster, well then, for that moment, you were free. Does that make any sense? ~ Paul Quarrington

Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)
there would be no end of cursing. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street. ~ Mark Helprin

There are hundreds of prisons - sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus. ~ Gerald Stern