prisoners Quotes

“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”

“Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?”

“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.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity.”

“You rogue, I have been drinking all night. I am not fitted for ‘t.”

“The zeks plodded on, heads down, like men going to a funeral. Nothing to lose now, we’re last back in camp anyway.”

“What kept body and soul together in these men was a mystery. Canvas belts were drawn tight around empty bellies. The frost was crackling merrily. Not a warm spot, nor a spark of fire anywhere.”

“A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually.”

“The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home . . . But they wouldn’t let him go home.”

“Amazing how time flew when you were working. He’d often noticed that days in the camp rolled by before you knew it. Yet your sentence stood still, the time you had to serve never got any less.”

“There was not even the ticking of a clock - prisoners were not allowed clocks. The big boys tell the time for them.”

“Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital.”

“You have no right to make people undress in the freezing cold! You don’t know Article 9 of the Criminal Code! . . . But they did have. They did know. It’s you, brother, who don’t know anything yet!”

“A zek’s day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything.”

“His one dream now was to fall sick for two or three weeks . . . not fatally . . . just sick enough to be put in the hospital.”

“What good is freedom to you! If you’re free, your faith will soon be choked by thorns! Be glad you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”

“Stared at the fire, huddled together in the half dark. Like a big family. That’s what a work gang is - a family.”

“Apart from sleep an old lag can call his life his own only for ten minutes at breakfast time, five at lunchtime, and five more at suppertime.”

“There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings - make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man - just make it look good.”

“In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?”

“When you’re flat on your face there’s no time to wonder how you got in and when you’ll get out.”

“He immediately stopped expecting anything from the goodies on display. No good letting your belly get excited when there’s nothing to come.”

“Why do they keep us behind high wire fences like we are criminals?”

“So we are in prison here because the government doesn’t want us.”

“Guards kept telling us that no one wanted us in Australia.”

“It would not be true to say that the prison was born with the new codes.”

″‘And now tell me, why is it that you use me words “good people” all the time? Do you call everyone that, or what?’ ‘Everyone,’ the prisoner replied. ‘There are no evil people in the world.‘”

“The journey to those feared mountains, however, was not as tortuous as it might have been. Although now doubly shackled to prevent further escape, the prisoners were hauled upon three buffalo-driven wagons.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to Mario. I’ll just have to serve out the time.”

″‘I was kidnapped by a huge octopus, whose prisoner I now am,’ said the king’s daughter. ‘Flee before it returns. But note that for three hours a day it changes into a red mullet and can be caught. But you have to kill the mullet at once, or it will change into a sea gull and fly away.‘”

″...Alec hit him on the cap with his tomahawk and said he was taking him prisoner and Rufus was upset because he’d dropped his whistle in the grass ..”

and besides, while Count Dracula was speaking, there was that in his eyes and in his bearing which made me remember that I was a prisoner, and that if I wished it I could have no choice.”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way, you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener might walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying, “What, Captain Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn’t look for you these two months; how do you find yourself?” Equally in his stopping at the bars and attending to anxious whisperers,—always singly,—Wemmick with his post-office in an immovable state, looked at them while in conference, as if he were taking particular notice of the advance they had made, since last observed, towards coming out in full blow at their trial.

“because she must either accept him or remain a prisoner, and you along with her, till your master dies.”

“Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that?”

“Prisoners don’t have geese running around the donjon-keep to pull pens out of, you muggins. They always make their pens out of the hardest, toughest, troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or something like that they can get their hands on; and it takes them weeks and weeks and months and months to file it out, too, because they’ve got to do it by rubbing it on the wall. They wouldn’t use a goose-quill if they had it. It ain’t regular.”

“It ain’nt no crime in a prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it’s his right; and so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to steal anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves out of prison with.”

“But, Jim, you got to have ‘em—they all do. So don’t make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain’t ever without rats. There ain’t no instance of it. And they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies. But you got to play music to them. You got anything to play music on?”

“Well, then, if you’re bound to go, I’ll tell you the way to do when you get to the village. Shut the door and blindfold the doctor tight and fast, and make him swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse full of gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around the back alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then fetch him here in the canoe, in a roundabout way amongst the islands, and search him and take his chalk away from him, and don’t give it back to him till you get him back to the village, or else he will chalk this raft so he can find it again. It’s the way they all do.”