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

solitary confinement — which is essentially what we are talking about — is considered a punishment inside a maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room.

Solitary confinement is one of the punishments most dreaded even by prisoners hardened to physical brutality, and is now a notorious procedure for inducing political compliance. (Conversely, the best of the known weapons against compliance is social organization.)

The world itself is but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution.

Loneliness feels like prison.

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

The only prison is myself.

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.