The Prisoner

All right,
Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I'm locked out of!

Imagine how frustrating it is, being completely locked up and watching your family leave, your wife and children, and not being able to do anything about it.

I'd have to lock the door of the paint room. He wouldn't allow anyone in. I was like a prisoner.

I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

Already then, there was in my subconsciousness as unsatisfactoriness about powerlessness, which was accompanied by being locked in a cage, whereby made taking an initiative, of any kind, impossible

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas, I must live alone like someone who has been banished.

Loneliness feels like prison.

I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts.

Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

To me, the gate of paradise is shut.
I stand an orphan there, locked out;
however much I knock, it's all in vain.

That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.