My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

I couldn't stand living in a society that admires the emperor's new clothes, when I see so clearly that he is naked.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.