Jack Abbott Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

The world is amazed at how 'cruel' it is! (This is very funny to think about!) And then, when the 'chips are down' (Sartre's favorite expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is enamored of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't involve getting his ass skinned, 'martyrs' himself. It is the same kind of responsibility anyone takes upon himself by submitting to your bad opinion of him by hanging his head and agreeing with all the accusations - and then, when he has done that, forlornly tells you he is sorry it rained last night, sorry the price of tea went up, etc. etc.

Jack Abbott
Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.

Jack Abbott
The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state of mind caused by the body. In a cell in the hole it only seems that there is a separation of mind and body - in fact, the body's condition (of deprivation of sensations; experiences, functions, and so on) controls the moods of the mind more than in any other situation I can think of.

Jack Abbott
One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

Jack Abbott
But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naive intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The composition of the mind is altered. Its previous cultivation is disintegrated and it has greater access to the brain, the body: it is Supersanity. Learning is turned inside out. You have to start from the top and work your way down. You must study mathematical theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk.

Jack Abbott
The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it becomes the Ancestor. Words and Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity.

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

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

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 anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

Jack Abbott
Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice.

Jack Abbott
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 cause.

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

Jack Abbott
Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Jack Abbott