Bird Caged Quotes & Sayings

I know why the caged bird sings. — Maya Angelou

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feed are tied
so his opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant ill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
from Caged Bird — Maya Angelou

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful
but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I felt like a bird, caged all its life, set free by an open window and cowering upon the windowsill. — Catherine M. Wilson

I know what the caged bird feels, alas! — Paul Laurence Dunbar

Do anything but love; or if thou lovest and art a woman, hide thy love from him whom thou dost worship; never let him know how dear he is; flit like a bird before him; lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower; but be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird, when caught and caged, be left to pine neglected and perish in forgetfulness. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. — Oscar Wilde

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

Even the caged bird flys out when someone opens the door for it — Andrea L'Artiste

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. — Maya Angelou

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective. — Maya Angelou

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,- When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings- I know why the caged bird sings! — Paul Laurence Dunbar

Truth can be awful and even excruciating, but once it's released, it's like a bird that's been caged too long who finally flies to freedom. I felt a little like that. Free — Ilsa Madden-Mills

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom. — Maya Angelou

With trembling eyes, Like a caged bird, From behind the picket-fence, She watched you go. — Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a caged bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?) — Angela Carter

How terrible it must be to be a member of the noble class. So many rules. Such restraint. You must feel like a caged bird, battering its wings against the sides of its golden prison. — Fiona Paul

Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Tell me why the caged bird nutters against its prison bars, and I will tell you why the soul sickens of earthliness. The bird has wings, and wings were made to cleave the air, and soar in freedom in the sun. The soul is immortal it cannot feed upon husks. — Randolph Sinks Foster

The soul is like a caged bird, it waits for the right person to open the door and set it free. — Belinda Taylor

I am a caged bird,
rattling the bars of my cage,
with furious flutterings,
break my chains!
Free my spirit!
Let me fly with the wings you have drawn upon my soul
with heaven dipped ink — Steven James

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration. — Maya Angelou

Caged birds sing of freedom, free birds fly. — Thorolf Rafto

Maya Angelou entered our lives at Virago in 1984, when we first published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "Entered our lives" is too tame. She danced, sang, and laughed her way straight into our hearts. She brought us a best-seller, but more than that, she brought us a reminder that the human need for dignity and recognition is a gift easily given to one another, but also frighteningly easy to withhold. — Lennie Goodings

You have a wild young heart. Right now, it is like a caged bird that batters itself against the bars. To struggle harder will only hurt you more. Wait, be patient. Your time will come to fly. And when it does, you must be strong, not bloodied and weary. — Robin Hobb

But, my dear friend Wildfire," said Carl Peterson laying his hand on the Indian's shoulder, "this is not a policy to live by."

"Then let it be a policy to die by," defiantly spoke the Indian. "If we cannot be free, let us die. What is life to a caged bird, threatened with death on all sides? — S. Alice Callahan

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them. — Oscar Wilde

Through millions of years of evolution, nature has caged you within certain boundaries - this is the human predicament. But this imprisonment is only on the level of biology. On the level of human consciousness, you are like a bird in a cage without a door. What a tragic irony! It is only out of long aeons of habit that you are refusing to fly free. Life — Sadhguru

Judging art is like caging a bird. Instead of seeing it soar, you can only watch it flutter. — Ron Brackin

Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I look through the cage ... an absolute beauty of yours ... — Ankur Kumar Shah

I was caged by him like a bird with clipped wings. I could flutter but I couldn't escape though I'm not certain I'd want to even if I could. — Paloma Beck

He was creating the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird. — Milorad Pavic

I have read in books that we are called 'caged birds'. I cannot speak for others, but I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe- at least that is what I then felt. — Rabindranath Tagore

If I'm going to be a caged bird, I'll sing the best song I can. — Wes Craven

I feel caged. Always. I feel like I am this bird, trapped and stifled and caged, and I keep looking for a way to escape, but I am barred at every turn. — Julianne Donaldson

There shall come a day when Birds shall be free ... and humans will see ... — K. Hari Kumar

You're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see - Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be. — Maggie Nelson

I wouldn't steal anything because stealing is wrong. If I had to, I'd steal a caged bird and set it free. — Arthur Darvill

I can't wait to read it, because I want to know how someone who was abused and raped as a child could grow up to write poems about being phenomenal when something so disgusting and humiliating has happened to her. (Kendra's words upon learning about Maya Angelou and her books I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Phenomenal Woman) — Kamichi Jackson

It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us. — Maya Angelou

When a child is born in a jail and during their life all they know is the jail they were born into, the idea of freedom becomes so terrifying that they ridicule the very thought of being free, as a clinical illness. It is nothing like the song that a caged bird sings. — Alejandro C. Estrada

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed. — Maya Angelou

If it weren't for her setting me free, I may still be a caged bird today, holding my own daughter captive on a shit-laden perch. — Raquel Cepeda

...you have torn my life all to pieces.. made me a victim, a caged bird! — Thomas Hardy

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'. — Sonya Hartnett

"And when you had made sure of the poor little fool," said my aunt - "God forgive me that I should call her so, and she gone where YOU won't go in a hurry - because you had not done wrong enough to her and hers, you must begin to train her, must you? begin to break her, like a poor caged bird, and wear her deluded life away, in teaching her to sing YOUR notes?" — Charles Dickens

You're a lot like that bird in the barn. You're so scared that you're going to be caged in forever you can't see the way out. You smack yourself against the wall again and again and again. The door is open, Beth. Stop running in circles and walk out. — Katie McGarry