Piper Kerman Quotes

#1. I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, "I don't eat iceberg lettuce!" Really? I asked myself. That's what you're going to throw down with? "I don't care what you eat, just don't be pickin' in there!

Piper Kerman

#2. What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty.

Piper Kerman

#3. Now I was a for-real, hardened con. I felt infinitely better. Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black, page 54

Piper Kerman

#4. In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price
widely variable
and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay.

Piper Kerman

#5. Maybe, because all these good people loved me enough to help me, maybe I wasn't quite as bad as I felt. Maybe there was a part of me that was worthy of their love.

Piper Kerman

#6. Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient - people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled.

Piper Kerman

#7. I imagined Martha Stewart trying to take over Pops kitchen. That would be better than Godzilla vs. Mothra

Piper Kerman

#8. Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime - certainly my own - yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society.

Piper Kerman

#9. Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants.

Piper Kerman

#10. From a young age I had learned to get over
to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve.

Piper Kerman

#11. IF YOU are a relatively small woman, and a man at least twice your size is bellowing at you in anger, and you're wearing a prisoner's uniform, and he has a pair of handcuffs on his belt, I don't care how much of a badass you think you are, you'll be fucking scared

Piper Kerman

#12. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments.

Piper Kerman

#13. D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Women

Piper Kerman

#14. I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others.

Piper Kerman

#15. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy.

Piper Kerman

#16. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always.

Piper Kerman

#17. It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard.

Piper Kerman

#18. You're looking for logic in all the wrong places.

Piper Kerman

#19. If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family's greatness. I had a lovely visit with my mother that

Piper Kerman

#20. We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.

Piper Kerman

#21. Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed - they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way.

Piper Kerman

#22. Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.

Piper Kerman

#23. I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges.

Piper Kerman

#24. We'll figure it out." He said, "It will all work out. Because I love you.

Piper Kerman

#25. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key?

Piper Kerman

#26. In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.

Piper Kerman

#27. I still don't believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person.

Piper Kerman

#28. The government's drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.

Piper Kerman

#29. About eighty percent of the women in U.S. prisons have children,

Piper Kerman

#30. Maybe if her mother had been put in treatment for her addictions (which were implicit) rather than in the garage in Danbury, Pom-Pom wouldn't be standing in his office today.

Piper Kerman

#31. But time was a beast, a big, indolent immovable beast that wasn't interested in my efforts at hastening it in any direction.

Piper Kerman

#32. Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.

Piper Kerman

#33. All this freedom, but I still feel like I'm locked up.

Piper Kerman

#34. Faggots make the best friends," she said philosophically. "They're very loyal.

Piper Kerman

#35. A warm, squirming lapful of golden puppy, licking and biting and unabashedly happy, made despair dissolve no matter how hard you were hanging on to it.

Piper Kerman

#36. Wanted to be home desperately, and when I said "home," that meant "wherever Larry is" more than Lower Manhattan,

Piper Kerman

#37. We were never friends. Not for a second. I loved you.

Piper Kerman

#38. If he is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.

Piper Kerman

#39. I was a well-educated young lady from Boston with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan. But I had no idea what to do with all my pent-up longing for adventure, or how to make my eagerness to take risks productive.

Piper Kerman

#40. one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons.

Piper Kerman

#41. When I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back,

Piper Kerman

#42. I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone.

Piper Kerman

#43. I certainly didn't look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs.

Piper Kerman

#44. It was more the idea that my intimate moments - changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying - were all in fact public, available for observation by these strange men.

Piper Kerman

#45. Memoirs are often about difficult things in a person's life. In my situation, my story starts with about the stupidest, most immoral thing I've ever done, one with terrible consequences.

Piper Kerman

#46. Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers
it was like Lord of the Flies on estrogen.

Piper Kerman

#47. No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn't deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind.

Piper Kerman

#48. If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.

Piper Kerman

#49. do your time, don't let the time do you.

Piper Kerman

#50. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person's word means everything and the other's means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint.

Piper Kerman

#51. I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I'd never heard against my brain cavity.

Piper Kerman

#52. I guess trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness.

Piper Kerman

#53. How important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment.

Piper Kerman

#54. Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?

Piper Kerman

#55. Box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too,

Piper Kerman

#56. The advice I got from many quarters was 'do your time, don't let the time do you.

Piper Kerman

#57. So for all my scoffing at "holy rollers," was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves?

Piper Kerman

#58. Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. V

Piper Kerman

#59. I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

Piper Kerman

#60. When you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand.

Piper Kerman

#61. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country.

Piper Kerman

#62. No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.

Piper Kerman