Matthew Arnold Quotes

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

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.

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.

Being in jail is difficult too because it's like being in a graveyard, you can't do much.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

I am jailed, with around 200 other inmates, in a wide hall that looks like a warehouse.

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.

Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.

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

I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

We have real cliched ideas of what prison life is like. It is not a happy place. It's a desperate, sad situation.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

I would like to say prison life at its very best and worst infinitely sucks.

It's [Jail's] like being at school. Except you can't leave.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

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!