David Sedaris Quotes

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

I really don't pay attention to the outside world when I'm incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don't pay attention to what's going on outside of jail, because it's all beyond my control.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.

In durance vile 1here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

Captivity is the greatest of all evils that can befall one.

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

When you're in prison, you can't do anything about what's happening outside.

In Prison Wearily, drearily, Half the day long, Flap the great banners High over the stone; Strangely and eerily Sounds the wind's song, Bending the banner-poles. While, all alone, Watching the loophole's spark, Lie I, with life all dark, Feet tethered, hands fettered Fast to the stone, The grim walls, square lettered With prisoned men's groan. Still strain the banner-poles Through the wind's song, Westward the banner rolls Over my wrong.

In my mind I'm a blind man doin' time.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.

When you get locked up, you get locked out.

Being in a five-by-seven every day for 365 days a year is more than what the average man could stand. You weren't built to be in a cage that long.

There's no way out of here.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.

We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

I am a poem. There is no way out.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!