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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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