Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes About Prisons

Quotes about: Prisons

• Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Lying, Believe, Maturity

• It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Party, Heart, Years

• He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Cutting, Opportunity, Men

• The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Prison, Prisoner

• You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Thinking, Soul, Prison

  "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 1962.

• Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Men, Differences, Prison

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1972). “The First Circle”

• If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Morning, Years, Clothes

• Let all of us who shared the prison soup meet again in better times!

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Soup, Prison

• Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Fate, Abdication, Steps

• When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Why Not, Prison, Graves

• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

• Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Prison, Bless

  "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Part IV, 1973.

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