All Jack Henry Abbott Quotes
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.
Jack Henry Abbott
58% of people like this quote
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.
Jack Henry Abbott
56% of people like this quote
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Jack Henry Abbott
56% of people like this quote
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.
Jack Henry Abbott
55% of people like this quote
The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.
Jack Henry Abbott
55% of people like this quote
When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.
Jack Henry Abbott
54% of people like this quote
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill.
Jack Henry Abbott
54% of people like this quote
I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.
Jack Henry Abbott
53% of people like this quote
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.
Jack Henry Abbott
53% of people like this quote
Nothing is over and done with. Nothing. Not even your malice.
Jack Henry Abbott
53% of people like this quote
My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.
Jack Henry Abbott
52% of people like this quote
Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.
Jack Henry Abbott
52% of people like this quote
As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.
Jack Henry Abbott
52% of people like this quote
That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.
Jack Henry Abbott
51% of people like this quote
The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.
Jack Henry Abbott
50% of people like this quote
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