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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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