My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

What you took as yourself begins to look like a little prison-house far away in the valley beneath you.

This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave.

No, I won't leave the world — I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum — don't you think I may end up there?

All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

What people mistook for safety was in fact captivity.

The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet.
They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

...most of us build prisons for ourselves and after we occupy them for a period of time we become accustomed to their walls and accept the false premise that we are incarcerated for life. As soon as that belief takes hold of us we abandon hope of ever doing more with our lives and of ever giving our dreams a chance to be fulfilled. We become puppets and begin to suffer living deaths. It may be praiseworthy and noble to sacrifice your life to a cause or a business or the happiness of others, but if you are miserable and unfulfilled in that lifestyle, and know it, then to remain in it is a hypocrisy, a lie, and a rejection of the faith placed in you by your creator.