Virginia Woolf Quotes

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!

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!

They wanna censor me, they ratha see me in a cell, livin' in hell, with only a few of us to live to tell.

I limited myself to one shout a day. But I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. And I knew from experience you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon.

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.

They put me in solitary confinement, and although I went on to do 8,755 days of solitary in total, the first two were the hardest. I almost went mad, beating my head against the wall.

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.

For being a bad student I was banished to the 'calaboose' - a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping

There's no way out of here.

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.

Let me out," Harry said again. "No," Dumbledore repeated. "If you don't - if you keep me in here - if you don't let me-" "By all means continue destroying my possessions," said Dumbledore. "I daresay I have too many.

It's like living in a retirement home! Clarence is taking a nap right now, and he eats at five. It's so boring." "You've only been here for two days." "And that's been more than enough. The only thing keeping me alive is that he keeps a hefty supply of liquor on hand. But at the rate I'm going, that'll be gone by the weekend. Jesus Christ, I'm climbing the walls." His eyes fell on the cross at my neck. "Oh. Sorry. No offense to Jesus.

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.

Inside the walls of a prison my body may be, but my Lord has set my soul free.

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.

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

I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

Imagine how frustrating it is, being completely locked up and watching your family leave, your wife and children, and not being able to do anything about it.

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

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.

Suppose you succeed in breaking the wall with your head. And what, then, will you do in the next cell?

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.