Patricia McConnell quotes:

I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

A crisis of confidence is so common that it should be considered a universal part of the adoption process.

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.

I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.

Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

I couldn't stand living in a society that admires the emperor's new clothes, when I see so clearly that he is naked.

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

I felt compelled to blow the whistle on the penal system, under the delusion that doing so might result in some change, or at least save a few women from the same fate. Eternally naïve, that's me.

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.

At eighty-one, health club-lusting is as close as I'll ever come to getting laid again.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

Although I was simply what today would be called a "mule" - the bottom of the food chain in the drug biz - the federal system treated me from beginning to end like a major criminal, and I still don't know why, other than that in those days, 6.5 ounces of heroin was a big load. Ludicrous by today's standards, when coke, heroin, and weed are shipped across the border by the ton.

I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

I was already a wreck when I went in, and prison nearly destroyed what little was left of me. I was worse when I came out than I was when I went in, and was not positively changed in any way.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."

My published works are concrete evidence that I exist.

One of the principle things life has taught me is that we always have a choice. When we say we "can't," we usually mean we're just not willing to pay the price.

People think I'm educated because I talk and write well, but the fact is I never finished high school. I've read a lot, is all.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

There's a stone I had made for Luke at the top of the hill road, where the pasture opens wide and the setting sun highlights the words carved into its face. "That'll do, Luke, that'll do." The words are said to working dogs all over the world when the chores are done and the flock is settled: "That'll do dog, come home now, your work is done." Luke's work is done too. He took my heart and ran with it, and he's running still, fast and strong, a piece of my heart bound up with his, forever.