This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

- Jack Abbott

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cau…

- Jack Abbott

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

- Jack Abbott

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

- Jack Abbott

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

- Jack Abbott

I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

- Jack Abbott

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

- Jack Abbott

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this a…

- Jack Abbott

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in…

- Jack Abbott