Prisoner Quotes

“After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ( "Corporeal prison" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it's tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Hey, times are tough, and thirty gold coins can do a lot of good. But I guess you wouldn't know about needing money, since you grew up like a little princ..."
(Rapunzel glares)
"Prin... soner. I mean, prisoner! A prisoner in a tower, such a shame, that.”
― Shannon Hale

“You are only a prisoner when you surrender.”
― Tad Williams, Shadowplay

“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“You are my son Dantés! You are the child of my captivity. My priestly office condemned me to celibacy: God sent you to me both to console the man who could not be a father and the prisoner who could not be free”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“He slid the ring onto my wedding finger. It fitted perfectly. A good omen? I tipped my hand this way and that, admiring the extravagant sparkle, and kept my truth buttoned all buttoned up.”
― Lesley Glaister, A Particular Man

“The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon’s World

“THE CURSE

May they never
Return home at night...

May you have no part of eventide,
May you have no room of your own,
Nor road, nor return.
May your days be all exactly the same,
Five Fridays in a row,
Always an unlucky Tuesday,
No Sunday,
May you have no more little worries,
Tears or inspiration,
For you yourself are the greatest worry on earth:

Prisoner!”
― Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

“You want to know about the place called Hell?" he asked the curious animal. "There is no Hell," he said. "Hell is in here." He touched the raw, pink skin of his chest with the tips of his fingers. "And it will forever brun inside me for what I have done.”
― Thomas E. Sniegoski, Aerie

“The architect of the walls around me is the fear within me. And if I have foolishly granted this architect full license to build whatever it pleases in whatever manner it pleases, I will find that I have confused safety with imprisonment.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Ice

Sometimes, the only things barring you
from Christ's Blessings--
Are the icicles surrounding your heart?”
― Theresa Rough PhD, Hundredfold Baroque Pearls

“Why not whip me now?' he asks, a challenge in his voice.

'Spending a night dreading what will come in the morning is it's own punishment.' She pauses. 'Especially as you now know your own hand can be turned against you.'

Oak looks directly into her eyes. 'Why are you keeping me at all, Wren? Am I a hostage to command? A lover to be punished? A possession to be locked away?'

'That,' she said, bitterness in her voice, 'is what I am trying to figure out myself.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“We are all prisoners of our own making, confined by the choices we've made.”
― Sharyn McCrumb, The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“Giving power to other people’s opinions will make you a prisoner to them – so never let someone else’s opinion define your reality.”
“অন্যের মতামতকে বেশি ক্ষমতা দিলে আপনি তাদের কাছে বন্দী হয়ে যাবেন- তাই , কখনো কারো মতামতকে আপনার বাস্তবতাকে সংজ্ঞায়িত করতে দেবেন না।”
― Mozammel Khan

“Thought doesn't necessarily calm a person, nor does confinement calm thought.”
― Fiona Kelly McGregor, Iris

“Denial of drinking water by police officers to dehydrated prisoners is a human rights abuse.”
― Steven Magee

“During the years of solitary confinement we had communicated with other POWs using a tap code -- tapping on the walls. During the time I was tortured I mainly tapped on the wall with Howie Dunn, a marine F-4 pilot. I poured out my heart to him. We talked about what the Vietnamese were doing to us, we talked about food, we talked about women, we talked about our past lives and what we wanted to do in the future. We tapped for hours. At one point I said, "Howie, what do you look like?" He tapped back and said, "Actually, I look a lot like John Wayne." We were moved away from each other, and I didn't talk to him for about five years. Right before we were coming home the Vietnamese allowed us to all get out together in a big compound and "greet one another" as they said. So I'm standing there talking to some people and this guy walks up to me -- he's short and bald and nondescript, a complete and absolute stranger. I had never laid eyes on him before. He sticks out his hand and says, "Hi, I'm Howie Dunn." In a flash, there he was, my best friend.

[Porter Halyburton, US Navy pilot POW in North Vietnam, 1965 - 1973]”
― Christian G. Appy, Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“From Player to Psychopath to Psychotic to Pantokrator to Patient to Prisoner & vice versa.”
― Sino Melo

“Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner. The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody’s ever going to let me out.
[...]
I’m like an insect that’s flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, ‘The shortness of life! The shortness of life!’
[...]
Why don’t I fly out again? There’s the window or the door or whatever it was I came in by. It’s not hopelessly shut—is it? Why don’t I find it and be off? Answer me that, little sister.” But he gave her no time to answer. “I’m exactly like that insect again. For some reason”—Jonathan paused between the words—“it’s not allowed, it’s forbidden, it’s against the insect law, to stop banging and flopping and crawling up the pane even for an instant.”
― Katherine Mansfield, At the Bay

“The topic was one he dreaded, for it reminded him just how much of a prisoner he was in his own life.
And fuck, that was heartbreaking to see.
Because I, too, was a prisoner in my life.”
― Kate Kimbrell, Ambrose

“She wondered when it had dawned on us that we where as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“What’s the point? Have you not noticed how they operate here? They eat before us, the council of three. Three males, making all the decisions. I follow orders. I’m good enough to fuck—not good enough to consult on decisions. Not good enough to trust with all the secrets they keep among themselves. Once, women ruled the fae world. We were treated like goddesses. Your mother brought all that back. A true fae queen, just like the old days. And I was going to be her successor, reviving the old House of Marc’h, ruled by women centuries ago. All I wanted was the power I deserved.”
― C.N. Crawford, Dark King

“There was no other prisoner who evoked rage and frustration in the citizens of Florida the way Bundy did. For many of them, he was no longer a human being; he was a cause.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness for entertainment? When we do this, are we hindering the progress of those who focus on criminal justice reform? To me, the answer seems obvious. When lurid storytellers reach out to us a generation after we committed our crimes and seek to portray us as evil, killers, psychopaths, it mocks the idea at the center of criminal justice reform: Each of us is more than our crimes.”
― John J. Lennon, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us