“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!”

“According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man’s faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man’s faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man’s knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.”

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

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.”

“The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement.”

“To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised.”

“Once I was in solitary confinement, it provided me with the isolated moments to reflect on my past and to dwell upon something greater, something better than involving myself in thuggery and criminality. It had to be more to life than that. It had to be more than the madness that was disseminating throughout this entire prison.”

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

“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.”

“What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer.”