Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and we are you.

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

There’s a prison there, too, which always makes me feel included.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Life at Cambridge during those war years was to me particularly congenial, and it completed the process of thorough absorption in English life which, from the beginning, I had found very easy. Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home—much more than in my native Austria from which I had already become somewhat estranged during the conditions of the 1920s. While neither on my early visit to the United States nor during my later stay there or still later in Germany did I feel that I really belonged there, English ways of life seemed so naturally to accord with all my instincts and dispositions that, if it had not been for very special circumstances, I should never have wished to leave the country again. And of all the forms of life, that at one of the colleges of the old universities...still seems to me the most attractive. The evenings at the High Table and the Combinations Room at King's are among the pleasantest recollections of my life, and some of the older men I came then to know well, especially J.H.Clapham, remained, while they lived, dear friends.

Enjoy yourself out there... in the asylum.

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science — where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

An exile is a refugee with a library!

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

"Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)

My chief qualification for the job is that I have been in almost every cell in the Moabit Prison in Berlin.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

However long we live here, however much I feel at home in Miami, I -- like everyone else -- am an exile, an exile who cannot go home.