Top 100 Piper Kerman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I still don’t believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person.”

— Piper Kerman

52. “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

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

— Piper Kerman

54. “Even when my clothes were taken away and replaced by prison khakis, I would have scoffed at the idea that the “War on Drugs” was anything but a joke. I would have argued that the government’s drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt.”

— Piper Kerman

55. “I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn’t terrified – really genuinely brave. 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.”

— Piper Kerman

56. “We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying.”

— Piper Kerman

57. “She was kind of like a SweeTart – sugary but also puckeringly sour.”

— Piper Kerman

58. “Piper, I think for you the hardest thing about prison will be chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people. Call me if you run into trouble. And don’t make any friends.”

— Piper Kerman

59. “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

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

61. “It’s the big moments, maybe, but it’s the little moments as much or even more.”

— Piper Kerman

62. “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

63. “This won me a couple of fans, notably with new neighbor Delicious, who shouted with surprise, P-I Piper! You got some nice titties! You got those TV titties!! They stand up on they own all perky and everything! Damn!”

— Piper Kerman

64. “Honey,” another prisoner drawled to me, “everyone here is just trying to live up to the worst cultural stereotype possible.” In.”

— Piper Kerman

65. “It was these simple things that were within your grasp in the degraded circumstances of life in prison; the things you could do yourself, or the small kindnesses one prisoner could extend to another. I.”

— Piper Kerman

66. “These pat-downs were delivered by both male and female guards and ran the gamut from perfunctory to full-out inappropriate. Most.”

— Piper Kerman

67. “In such a harsh, corrupt, and contradictory environment, one walks a delicate balance between the prison’s demands and your own softness and sense of your own humanity.”

— Piper Kerman

68. “THE RIGHTS of a prisoner are so few, so unprotected, and so unenforced that a small minority of prisoners have an urgent need to fight for them at every opportunity.”

— Piper Kerman

69. “Many of the women in Danbury had been cloistered away in prison for years, and despite the harshness of being institutionalized, it was also infantilizing.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

71. “I saw that those who couldn’t come to terms with their imprisonment had a very difficult time with staff and with other prisoners. They were in constant conflict because they couldn’t reconcile themselves with their fellow prisoners.”

— Piper Kerman

72. “I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary.”

— Piper Kerman

73. “In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system. It.”

— Piper Kerman

74. “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. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful prison is rather than envisioning your future.”

— Piper Kerman

75. “Rose, chatting in the midst of a pedicure one day, told me what she had learned from her faith; I thought later that hers were the most powerful words a person could utter: “I’ve got a lot to give.”

— Piper Kerman

76. “How could I admit that the All-American Girl’s force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn’t working, wasn’t keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away? From.”

— Piper Kerman

77. “I was so disgusted with the BOP’s farcical prerelease program that I just shut my eyes and waited for it to be over. One.”

— Piper Kerman

78. “He became distinctly less fun.”

— Piper Kerman

79. “It was hard for me to believe that the nature of our crimes was what accounted for my fifteen-month sentence versus some of my neighbors’ much lengthier ones. I had a fantastic private attorney and a country-club suit to go with my blond bob. Compared.”

— Piper Kerman

80. “The beautiful irony of Larry’s family was that when something minor was amiss, it was as if the Titanic were going down, but when a real disaster struck, they were the people you wanted in your life raft. I had expected an explosion of recrimination and rejection and instead got a big hug.”

— Piper Kerman

81. “Certain prison guards relish the power and control that they wield over other human beings. It oozes from their pores. They believe it is their privilege, their right, and their duty to make prison as miserable as possible by threatening, withholding, or abusing at every opportunity.”

— Piper Kerman

82. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Women.”

— Piper Kerman

83. “Under the Volcano.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

85. “In fact, it was the easiest relationship I had ever been in, by far.”

— Piper Kerman

86. “Well, that little woman, who never said boo to no one, put two locks in a sock, and she let that girl know what time it was.”

— Piper Kerman

87. “Then in August everyone had one month in which to smoke their brains out before going cold turkey on one of the most addictive drugs known to man.”

— Piper Kerman

88. “In many places in the United States pregnant female prisoners are kept chained in shackles during their deliveries, a brutal and barbaric practice, though this was not the case for poor Doris.”

— Piper Kerman

89. “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

90. “I had long recognized that faith helped people understand their relationship to their community. In the best cases it helped women in Danbury focus on what they had to give instead of what they wanted.”

— Piper Kerman

91. “If you had the misfortune of having the government intimately involved with your life, whether via public housing or Medicaid or food stamps, then you’d probably already spent an insane amount of your life in line. I.”

— Piper Kerman

92. “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.”

— Piper Kerman

93. “According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order.”

— Piper Kerman

94. “Why don’t you come with me, keep me company?” she suggested. “You don’t have to do anything, just hang out.”

— Piper Kerman

95. “She was perceptive and sensitive but had great difficulty expressing herself in a way that was not off-putting to others, and she got loud and angry when she felt disrespected, which was often.”

— Piper Kerman

96. “My bedrock sense of myself was in some danger. Food, sometimes edible, was brought on a regular schedule, and in this new universe that was really all you could count on as a stable principle.”

— Piper Kerman

97. “I think there’s this expectation that confinement alone will create the incentive and the means for an individual to make a change in their life. But it doesn’t.”

— Piper Kerman

98. “Reunited with Nora in our luxurious room, I felt shy with her in this unfamiliar setting. But she acted as if this were all perfectly normal.”

— Piper Kerman

99. “When I walked through the terrifying gates of the FCI seven months before, I certainly didn’t look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs. My overwhelming regret over my actions was because of the trauma I had caused my loved ones and the consequences I was facing.”

— Piper Kerman

100. “Perhaps I was just dense, unable to understand these things from a distance but instead intent on scorching myself face to the fire, burning off my eyelashes. Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?”

— Piper Kerman