Piper Kerman Quotes

do your time, don't let the time do you.

I still don't believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person.

Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants.

How important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment.

We were never friends. Not for a second. I loved you.

If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family's greatness. I had a lovely visit with my mother that

If he is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.

Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?

one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons.

When I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back,

But time was a beast, a big, indolent immovable beast that wasn't interested in my efforts at hastening it in any direction.

I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone.

Faggots make the best friends," she said philosophically. "They're very loyal.

About eighty percent of the women in U.S. prisons have children,

I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges.

Wanted to be home desperately, and when I said "home," that meant "wherever Larry is" more than Lower Manhattan,

What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key?

It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments.

Box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too,

Now I was a for-real, hardened con. I felt infinitely better. Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black, page 54

The advice I got from many quarters was 'do your time, don't let the time do you.

All this freedom, but I still feel like I'm locked up.

We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.

You're looking for logic in all the wrong places.

Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed - they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way.

You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy.

I guess trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness.

I certainly didn't look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs.

Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers
it was like Lord of the Flies on estrogen.

Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.

I imagined Martha Stewart trying to take over Pops kitchen. That would be better than Godzilla vs. Mothra

It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard.

We'll figure it out." He said, "It will all work out. Because I love you.

When you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand.