I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.