Cages Quotes - Page 2

• Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

  Alejandro Jodorowsky

  Thinking, Bird, Flying

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• I am a cage, in search of a bird.

  Franz Kafka

  Bird, Novelists, Chaos

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• You are not called to be a canary in a cage. You are called to be an eagle, and to fly sun to sun, over continents.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Opportunity, Eagles, Sun

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• Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

  J. K. Rowling

  Heart, Exercise, Thinking

  27 Copy quote

• I know why the caged bird sings.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Children, Book

  Title of book (1969), taken from the last line of "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar in Lyrics of Hearthside (1899). Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979) 567:10

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• That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Depression, Keys, Sight

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Home, Life Is, Natural

  Getting Married (1911) preface "Hearth and Home"

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• Much talking is the cause of danger. Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely about.

  Sakya Pandita

  Change, Happiness, Mean

  90 Copy quote

• A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

  Tennessee Williams

  Prayer, Heart, Wild At Heart

  Tennessee Williams (2008). “Camino Real”, p.162, New Directions Publishing

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• The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

  Anthony Burgess

  Wise, Brother, Wine

  9 Copy quote

• Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Art, Majority Rule

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.622, Vintage

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• I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Courage, People, Lions

  14 Copy quote

• I have a tendency to kick it up. I like to rattle the cage.

  Lisa Marie Presley

  Tendencies, Kicks

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• What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

  Herbert Spencer

  Selfish, Men, Law

  Herbert Spencer (2016). “Social Statics: Great Essays”, p.14, VM eBooks

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• Something about her eyes or voice has always suggested the hint of a free spirit, trapped in a Peck and Peck cage, dreaming of making rude noises at public gatherings of Republicans.

  Jeff Greenfield

  Dream, Freedom, Eye

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• A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.

  William Blake

  Animal, Heaven, Humanity

  "Auguries of Innocence" l. 5 (ca. 1803)

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• The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

  Victor Hugo

  Bird, Soul, Body

  Victor Hugo (1987). “Les Misérables”, Signet Classics

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• People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

  Alain de Botton

  People, Interesting, Bars

  Twitter post from Apr 18, 2011

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• The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

  Germaine Greer

  Mother, Song, Children

  Germaine Greer (1990). “The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings”, p.115, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

  Robert Fulghum

  Humanity, Bars, Human Nature

  Robert Fulghum (2004). “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things”, p.261, Ballantine Books

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• Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.

  Richard Lovelace

  Wall, Angel, Iron

  "To Althea, from Prison" l. 25 (1649)

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• Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Media, Bird, Lines

  "The Amazing Success Story of ‘Spiri Who?’" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., www.nytimes.com. July 26, 1970.

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• Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the given material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

  Earle Brown

  Art, Degrees, Given

  "Classic Essays on Twentieth-century Music: A Continuing Symposium". Book by Richard Kostelanetz, ‎Joseph Darby, ‎Matthew Santa, 1996.

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• A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again.

  Horace

  Wise, Wisdom, Back Again

  Horace (1903). “Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus Into English Prose”

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• Cold walls do not a prison make, nor iron bands a bondsman.

  Scott Lynch

  Wall, Angel, Iron

  16 Copy quote