Top 28 Jack Henry Abbott Quotes
#1. Sometimes I doubt that anyone with a philosophical turn of mind is fit to judge anyone. He never comprehends the concept of guilt.
Jack Henry Abbott
#2. It is funny that some of must not only get our bearings but must also know all the details of the world before we venture out into it.
Jack Henry Abbott
#3. Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.
Jack Henry Abbott
#4. 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.
Jack Henry Abbott
#5. To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Jack Henry Abbott
#7. I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.
Jack Henry Abbott
#8. 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.
Jack Henry Abbott
#9. Indeed, it is almost a rule that the more simple and commonplace something is, the more difficult it is to understand it.
Jack Henry Abbott
#10. One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.
Jack Henry Abbott
#11. The wasteland that is your memory now comes under the absolute dictatorship of idols too terrible to mention.
Jack Henry Abbott
#12. Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.
Jack Henry Abbott
#13. To illustrate: to walk ten miles in an enclosed space of ten feet is not really movement. There are not ten miles of space, only time.
Jack Henry Abbott
#14. The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.
Jack Henry Abbott
#15. The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.
Jack Henry Abbott
#16. There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill.
Jack Henry Abbott
#17. Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.
Jack Henry Abbott
#18. When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.
Jack Henry Abbott
#19. I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human"
as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.
Jack Henry Abbott
#20. I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.
Jack Henry Abbott
#21. 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.
Jack Henry Abbott
#22. I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape.
Jack Henry Abbott
#23. As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.
Jack Henry Abbott
#24. That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.
Jack Henry Abbott
#26. When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.
Jack Henry Abbott
#27. The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state caused by the body ... William James described this relationship when he said we become sad because we shed tears: we do not shed tears because we are sad.
Jack Henry Abbott
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