Top 100 Piper Kerman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Don’t tell me what to do – you have eight numbers after your name just like me.”

— Piper Kerman

52. “The world kept going despite the fact that I had been removed to an alternate universe.”

— Piper Kerman

53. “I still don’t believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person.”

— Piper Kerman

54. “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

55. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Piper Kerman

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

— 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. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Piper Kerman

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “When we got back to the States, I took the first flight to California I could get. From the safety of the West Coast I broke all ties with Nora and put my criminal life behind me.”

— Piper Kerman

74. “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

75. “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?”

— Piper Kerman

76. “I also gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status – their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime. This made their lives uncertain on every level, and those who were not already crazy were acting pretty wacko, driven nuts by rage and instability.”

— Piper Kerman

77. “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

78. “The release of so much collective happiness in that miserable place was almost too much for me. It was like hot and cold air colliding, creating a tornado right inside the hall.”

— Piper Kerman

79. “Small involvement in the drug trade could land you in prison for many years, especially if you had a lousy court-appointed lawyer.”

— Piper Kerman

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

— Piper Kerman

81. “When I would crawl, exhausted, out of the editing room after hours, I could always count on Larry for late dinner or later drinks.”

— Piper Kerman

82. “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

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

— Piper Kerman

84. “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

85. “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

86. “We were scared – two hundred prisoners alone with one guard having a psychotic break.”

— Piper Kerman

87. “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

88. “What Gisela was describing to me was an exquisitely intimate and happy love. I thought it was the most compelling description of faith that I had ever heard. I wasn’t about to grab a Bible; nor was our conversation about me or my choices in any way. It was food for thought.”

— Piper Kerman

89. “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

90. “He became distinctly less fun.”

— Piper Kerman

91. “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

92. “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

93. “It’s not easy to sacrifice your anger, your sense of being wronged.”

— Piper Kerman

94. “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

95. “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. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer.”

— 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. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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