“They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my life. I lost my reputation. I lost my – I lost my dignity.”
″‘This is the Quiet Box,’ Grandma said. ‘It is much more durable than any cell in the entire dungeon. It holds only a single prisoner, but it always holds a single prisoner. The only way to get the captive out is to put another in.‘”
“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.”
“When he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?”
“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”
″‘You are not to go outside under any circumstances,’ Silvia continued, ‘During the day, there will be times when you can go into the garden, but not without permission.‘”
“The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.”
“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”
“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.”
“We went once that week to see Mama in Salem Prison. It was such a terrible place that Mary and I wept openly. But Mama was so busy attending to the other women that she could not abide our tears.”
“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.”
“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. ”
“Impulsively, Wilson drew aside the curtain. He did not know, immediately, if he would survive. [...] Imprisoned in this swollen mass, his heart pulsed strickenly, threatening to burst its case as Wilson sat, paralyzed. Only inches away, separated from him by the thickness of a piece of glass, the man was staring at him.”
..when the spoon is locked up in prison, the picture indicates he is sad because of his body posture (bending over and droopy) without the words having to.
“Strong gates,” said Pod, “gates you can’t open. What are they there for?”
“Against the mice?” said Arrietty.
“Yes,” agreed Pod uncertainly, as though he gave her half a mark, “but mice never hurt no one. What else?”
[…]
“Cats?” echoed Arrietty, surprised.
“Or to keep you in?” suggested Pod.
Then disaster - for that night a foul-smelling nearby tenement collapsed in an appalling ruin of neglect, and Mr. Pargeter, subsequently imprisoned for publishing a fiery protest against such conditions, was twice found guilty of sedition.
The daughter of a bookseller has to cope when he is imprisoned under the draconian and repressive libel laws of the early 1900s. We learn a lot about those laws, and about the changing class structure at the beginning of century.
“Few, however, know the captain’s secret… that she has donned armour and passed herself off as a man in order to search for her beloved who has been imprisoned by the Turks. ”