I’d kill for any one of my friends. Thankfully for the overpopulated prison system, I don’t have any friends.
Now that you’re here, now that they know you exist, you’ll never be free again. Ever. We’re prisoners to our books, our fates planned long before we were born. You’re no different than us. Fight your fate all you want, but deep down you know ...
One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one's innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free mysel...
The Builders are building with you in mind, dear citizen, so don’t worry your tiny mind about whether the bricks they are using are going to construct schools or prisons. They won’t tell, and you can’t tell, so just keep watching the news and i...
It was difficult to see the exact nature of his expression as, in addition to the ubiquitous mustache, the clockmaker also wore a golden-brown beard of such epic proportions as might dwarf a mulberry bush. It was as though his mustache had become ove...
Shouldn't it be atheists, believing they are not being watched, who commit virtually all the crimes and fill up all the prisons, while people who believe in an omnipresent god lead spotless lives out of either respect or fear? But this is far from th...
They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet,...
We ought not to be in too much of a hurry here to speak piously of God’s will and guidance. It is obvious, and it should not be ignored, that it is your own very human wills that are at work here, celebrating their triumph; the course that you are ...
As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the ...
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your though...
I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.
Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it...
She was prisoner to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet... the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she seemed much happier than me, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with ...
I had a dream about you. Too many people died that day for us to talk about love. But through the stench of rotting corpses, all I could think about was how beautiful you were and how much I wanted to avoid prison.
So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destr...
In 'The Next Three Days,' even though it was a prison breakout movie, I was asking myself, 'What would I do? How far would I go for the woman I loved? How far would I go, and what would I do when the person then told me that they were guilty? Could I...
African-Americans assume I'm named after the notorious Soledad prison or Mount Soledad in California. Latinos want to know if I'm lonely. That doesn't fit, because I grew up with five siblings, and I have four kids of my own, so I'm not lonely at all...
I'm unique for a suspense author in that I don't have a specialty background. A lot of suspense writers used to be lawyers or crime beat reporters. I didn't even know a cop when I started out. I finally figured out that I could visit prisons - I just...
When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escal...
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I...
It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tinie...
