Top 100 Piper Kerman Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Piper Kerman

2. “All this freedom, but I still feel like I’m locked up.”

— Piper Kerman

3. “There’s strength in admitting what you can’t do. Nobody likes it. But it’s self-preservation.”

— Piper Kerman

4. “If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.”

— Piper Kerman

5. “We’ll figure it out.” He said, “It will all work out. Because I love you.”

— Piper Kerman

6. “From a young age I had learned to get over – to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve.”

— Piper Kerman

7. “Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world? The vilest thing I had located, within myself and within the system that held me prisoner, was an indifference to the suffering of others.”

— Piper Kerman

8. “In order for prisons to truly serve the public, the people who run them would do well to aspire to the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, the storied warden of New York’s Sing Sing Prison in the early part of the twentieth century, who vowed, ‘We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop.”

— Piper Kerman

9. “Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

11. “Lack of empathy lies at the heart of every crime – certainly my own – yet empathy is the key to bringing a former prisoner back into the fold of society.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

13. “Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.”

— Piper Kerman

14. “The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn’t just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

16. “Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?”

— Piper Kerman

17. “D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

— Piper Kerman

18. “Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role.”

— Piper Kerman

19. “The advice I got from many quarters was ’do your time, don’t let the time do you.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

21. “Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn’t want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly. I waited an unquantifiable amount of time while trying to be brave.”

— Piper Kerman

22. “On the other hand, some people were way too comfortable in prison. They seemed to have forgotten the world that exists on the outside. You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It’s not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months.”

— Piper Kerman

23. “There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you.”

— Piper Kerman

24. “A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there as to know might be the way to live life, now and always.”

— Piper Kerman

25. “The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint.”

— Piper Kerman

26. “I am confident that someday in the future The Rock, who was once a professional wrestler, will run for president of the United States, and I think that he will win. I have seen with my own eyes the power of The Rock. The Rock is a uniter, not a divider.”

— Piper Kerman

27. “This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the ‘real world’ out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.”

— Piper Kerman

28. “There was less bulimia and more fights than I had known as an undergrad, but the same feminine ethos was present – empathetic camaraderie and bawdy humor on good days, and histrionic dramas coupled with meddling, malicious gossip on bad days.”

— Piper Kerman

29. “I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive. Some people on the outside look for what is amiss in every interaction, every relationship, and every meal; they are always trying to hang their mortality on improvement. It was incredibly liberating to instead tackle the trick of making each day fly more quickly. “Time, be my friend,” I repeated every day.”

— Piper Kerman

30. “I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, “I don’t eat iceberg lettuce!” Really? I asked myself. That’s what you’re going to throw down with? “I don’t care what you eat, just don’t be pickin’ in there!”

— Piper Kerman

31. “No one who worked in “Corrections” appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.”

— Piper Kerman

32. “According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin.”

— Piper Kerman

33. “A warm, squirming lapful of golden puppy, licking and biting and unabashedly happy, made despair dissolve no matter how hard you were hanging on to it.”

— Piper Kerman

34. “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.”

— Piper Kerman

35. “It was more the idea that my intimate moments – changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying – were all in fact public, available for observation by these strange men.”

— Piper Kerman

36. “Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.”

— Piper Kerman

37. “In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price – widely variable – and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay.”

— Piper Kerman

38. “How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?”

— Piper Kerman

39. “A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more producitve for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed.”

— Piper Kerman

40. “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.”

— Piper Kerman

41. “I was a well-educated young lady from Boston with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan. But I had no idea what to do with all my pent-up longing for adventure, or how to make my eagerness to take risks productive.”

— Piper Kerman

42. “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? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?”

— Piper Kerman

43. “I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street, into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others.”

— Piper Kerman

44. “So for all my scoffing at “holy rollers,” was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves?”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

46. “Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time.”

— Piper Kerman

47. “A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.”

— Piper Kerman

48. “Someone going home was a victory for us all. I.”

— Piper Kerman

49. “No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn’t deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind.”

— Piper Kerman

50. “Don’t tell me what to do – you have eight numbers after your name just like me.”

— Piper Kerman