confinement Quotes

“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.”

″“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”″

“Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. […] And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.”

“The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

“‘Out there’s the Maze,’ Newt whispered, eyes wide as if in a trance. ‘Everything we do—our whole life, Greenie—revolves around the Maze. Every lovin’ second of every lovin’ day we spend in honor of the Maze, tryin’ to solve somethin’ that’s not shown us it has a bloody solution, ya know? And we want to show ya why it’s not to be messed with. Show ya why them buggin’ walls close shut every night. Show ya why you should never, never find your butt out there’”

“So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas.”

“Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.”

“But here, in our tunnel, we feel it no longer. The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. And these three hours give us strength for our hours above the ground.”

“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

“We opened our eyes, lying on our stomach on the brick floor of a cell. We looked upon two hands lying far before us on the bricks, and we moved them, and we knew that they were our hands.”

“I try to brush the hairs flat with my hand and freeze at the sight of my old hand on my old head. I lean close and open my eyes very wide, trying to see beyond the sagging flesh. It’s no good. Even when I look straight into the milky blue eyes, I can’t find myself anymore. When did I stop being me?”

“I scotch to the edge of my seat and reach for my walker. By my estimation, I’m only eighteen feet from freedom. Well, there’s an entire city block to traverse after that, but if I hoof it I bet I can catch the last few acts. […] I may be in my nineties, but who says I’m helpless?”

“I cling to my anger with every ounce of humanity left in my ruined body, but it’s no use. It slips away, like a wave from shore. I am pondering this sad fact when I realize the blackness of sleep is circling my head. It’s been there awhile, biding its time and growing closer with each revolution”

“I weave on my knees trying to figure out who and what and where but now the ground comes screaming toward me. I’m powerless to stop it so I brace myself, but in the end it isn’t necessary because the blackness swallows me before it hits.”

“On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones.”

“A person must start with a willingness to learn and follow it with long, hard study. I grok that is salutary.”

“Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to, every time.”

“A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise of the thinking faculty.”

“The political prisoners were liberated a few days later. There were 3000 of them.”

“As for Houshang, Zozo’s husband, he was a CEO in Iran, but in Austria, he was nothing.”

“How good it feels to walk without a veil on my head.”

“A part of me understood (my old friends). When something is forbidden, it takes on a disproportionate importance.”

“Since we weren’t married, we couldn’t kiss each other in public, or even give one another a friendly hug to express our extreme joy. We risked imprisonment and being whipped.”

“i usedta live in the world then i moved to HARLEM & my universe is now six blocks”

“It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend.”

“For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.”

“Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”

“I must know more than I know already. For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains, and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. But my dream had nothing to do with England and I must not think like this, I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.”

“Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”

“Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.”