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.

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.

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.

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.

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

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.