Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

There's no doubt I expect to die in prison.

I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time.

You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

I witnessed other inmates' time run out, and I'd be lying if I said you don't ask yourself, 'Wow, is that going to happen to me?'

The irony of prison is that it takes years and years and years to plan an elaborate escape, but all you have is years and years and years.

This is serious, if Martha gets the maximum sentence on all counts, she could serve 20 years in prison. Of course, you have to take off time off for good behavior, which means 20 years in prison.

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

I spent 24 and a half years in prison

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

There is never enough time, unless you're serving it.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.

Doing time is like climbing a mountain wearing roller skates.

Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.

It was hell, hugging my Mama from a jail cell.

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes.

Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. (...)

I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!