Top 51 Quotes About Solitary Confinement
#1. We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Tennessee Williams
#2. If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.
Martha Beck
#3. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
Will Self
#4. External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!
Jules Verne
#5. But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement - did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells?
Emma Donoghue
#6. If you spit in my face and smack me in the mouth and throw me into solitary confinement for nothing ... what do you think's gonna happen when i get out of here?
Charles Manson
#7. We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
#8. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it's absolute unfreedom.
Arthur Koestler
#9. My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.
Heather King
#10. Evoke at painful junctures, when discouragement threatens to raise its head, the image of a vast cretinous mouth, red blubber and slobbering, in solitary confinement, extruding indefatigably, with a noise of wet kisses and washing in a tub, the words that obstruct it.
Samuel Beckett
#11. The Truth is in the prolouge.
Death to the romantic fool.,
the expert in solitary confinement.
Pablo Neruda
#12. I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
Mary Roach
#13. That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk.
Assata Shakur
#14. In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.
Billie Holiday
#15. Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#16. There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.
Jenny Offill
#17. Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.
Peter Straub
#18. Naughty Fiona was on lockdown in bad-girl solitary confinement.
Candis Terry
#19. I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves-with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)-to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveilla nce state
Daniel Ellsberg
#20. We are all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life." Tennessee Williams
Anton War
#21. I don't think we ever get away from the fear of labels and being different. It's human nature to want to be part of a community. That's why excommunication and solitary confinement are such brutal forms of punishment.
Matte Bach
#22. We are relational creatures. All humans live in community and most people seek social interaction. In western culture, isolation is seen as one of the most stringent of punishments. Even criminals do not aspire to solitary confinement.
Gary Chapman
#23. I have spent 11 horrific years in solitary confinement in a 6-square-meter dungeon three floors underground without sunlight or fresh air. But I endured my hardships because I was merely living my convictions.
Samir Geagea
#24. I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse.
Daniel Quinn
#25. People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment.
Richard Paul Evans
#26. What do the animals do in the zoo? That's the same thing that I do in my cell. I play with myself. I make little string dolls. I talk to roaches. I'm in jail for nine counts of murder, and I didn't do it. I'm in solitary confinement, may I add.
Charles Manson
#27. I would like to start a discussion about ending solitary confinement. I'd like to start a discussion about the removal of MO wings - an "MO" is a "Mental Observation" inmate - from Rikers Island, to be set up in mental health institutions. You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders.
Cecily McMillan
#28. To some extent, all authors are a little schizophrenic. We lead most of our lives in solitary confinement, living and breathing the books that we're writing.
Sophie Kinsella
#29. For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.
William Styron
#30. Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.
Virginia Woolf
#31. If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.
Florence King
#32. They got it wrong when they called it "the closet." This was a prison. Solitary confinement. I was locked inside, inside myself, dark and afraid and alone. (Chapter. 23)
Julie Anne Peters
#33. During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.
Tahir Shah
#34. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
Karl Kraus
#35. There's a big difference between being alone and being lonely. And I'm guessing that once you've discovered this distinction you can't go back to solitary confinement without serious emotional repercussions.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#36. How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement have gone mad - simply because the thinking faculties have lain dormant!
Jules Verne
#37. Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#39. It was a state of aloneness. It was the kind of place that started shooting political prisoners because it suspected that they would enjoy solitary confinement and internal exile too much.
Will Wiles
#40. Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.
Gary Chapman
#41. I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week for years. Being a comic book artist is like sentencing yourself to life imprisonment at hard labor in solitary confinement. I don't think I'd do it again.
Wally Wood
#42. The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.
Eric Maisel
#43. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.
Noam Chomsky
#44. One of the worst cases is that of ASSATA SHAKUR, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men's prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.
Assata Shakur
#46. Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#47. It's strange when they near your cell. You lose all your strength and you are like this. You lose all your strength as if a rope is dragging it out of you. Then the footsteps stop in front of another solitary confinement cell and when you hear the sound of the key turning you feel relieved.
Sakae Menda
#48. I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.
Nelson Mandela
#49. In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
David Graeber
#50. ... I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they'd leave me alone.
Andre Breton
#51. The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement.
Joyce Meyer
