As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.

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.

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

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

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

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

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

I, Joan Crawford, I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

No man can resolve himself into Heaven.

Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilites from which only Death can file their fetters.

To be a judge you don't have to know about books, you have to be skilled at picking shrapnel out of your head.

I have learned how to love. And it's a terrible thing. I'm broken. My heart is broken. Help me.

I worry about a society that can remember everything.

The struggle is what teaches you.