Quotes
Quotes about Prison
A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I 'll not march through Coventry with them, that's flat: nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the shoulders like an herald's coat without sleeves.
The insane root
That takes the reason prisoner.
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,
May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two
Guiltier than him they try.
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul
And lap it in Elysium.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
I burn to set the imprison'd wranglers free,
And give them voice and utterance once again.
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand.
The vilest deeds like poison-weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate
And the Warder is Despair.
Note 13.Robert Stephen Hawker incorporated these lines into "The Song of the Western Men," written by him in 1825. It was praised by Sir Walter Scott and Macaulay under the impression that it was the ancient song. It has been a popular proverb throughout Cornwall ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the seven bishops,--one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawny.
Prisoners of hope.
The autobiographer can see himself as the only true historian in the sense that he is presenting the life of perennial humanity. In the narrower sense, he provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time.
To make an illformed sentence like 'Boy out now Wellington transfuse coop'is to write true nonsense, but we are so structured that we will find meaning in it if we can. We will take it that the printer has erred, and that a boy just out of prison in the town of Wellington is willing to cooperate in giving blood for a transfusion
I felt ... the generalized pity one always feels for the defenceless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenceless prisoner of life
Q: What do you call a clairvoyant midget who just broke out of prison? A: A small medium at large.
When you see a man led to prison say in your heart, "Mayhap he is escaping from a narrower prison." And when you see a man drunken say in your heart, "Mayhap he sought escape from something still more unbeautiful." -Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) [Sand and Foam]
In times when the government imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also the prison.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
