Quotes & Sayings About Cages

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death - death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die ... . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday - that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive ... .." The guest star retires down the corridors. — Thomas Pynchon

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open. — Andre Maurois

If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by her ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future - staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage. Humility is the master key that can get you out of all your cages; why do you choose your ego and stay in your prisons? — C. JoyBell C.

I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves. — Margaret Atwood

The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most. — Victor Hugo

Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in cages too.
So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares.
Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn't do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren't happy and didn't feel free. You made all the cages, the you wondered why you didn't feel free. — Kent Nerburn

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country. — Aravind Adiga

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves ... — Eve Ensler

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned. — Nirmalananda

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. — Lester Bangs

Sometimes the truth doesn't set you free, Jules. Sometimes it cages you. — Gwenda Bond

I don't like cages, — Richelle Mead

Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages. — Spiro T. Agnew

I was watching MTV and there were girls dancing in suspended cages. That would be an ambivalent situation: "I'm trapped! ... but enjoying the music". — Demetri Martin

The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground, — Kenneth S. Deffeyes

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals
weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with
and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered. — Susan Hubbard

Madonna, she still has not showed, we see this empty cage now corrode, where her cape of the stage once had flowed, the fiddler he now steps to the road, on the back of the fish truck that loads, while my conscience explodes. — Bob Dylan

In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal. Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road. — Peter Singer

It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands ... but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices. — Tom Regan

I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures. — Christiaan Barnard

What made Guantanamo such a travesty - and what still makes it such - is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. — Glenn Greenwald

A cage stokes our emotions and imaginations, regardless of whether you are inside looking out, or outside looking in. — Michael Makai

I'll get a nice little break, after doing Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Whether I'm in [his show], I don't know, but there's The Defenders. — Mike Colter

One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monkeys, some of which were carrying unusual viruses. These animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade? — Richard Preston

Oh, September. Such lonely, lost things you find on your way. It would be easier, if you were the only one lost. But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like. [ ... ] If you would only leave cages locked and turn away from unloved Wyverns, you could stay Heartless. But you are stubborn, and do not listen to your elders. — Catherynne M Valente

Sometimes you think they must have come out of the chimp cages at the Bronx zoo. — Gerry Cheevers

And then a strange thing happened. Out of the diseased and deteriorated pool os tired thoughts came life. A simple and poisoned life, but a life nonetheless. Death cultivated tis bacteria with love and attention. It thived in its stifling, hopeless world, sapping Death os all its energy, but Death didn't notice, for all its attention went on the fracturing, multiplying, fragmentary creations inside it.
And when the virus had eaten every fleck of Death, it lived on in Death's dry sarcophagus.
Life implied by Death. — Dave McKean

Freedom isn't a hope for those who live in a cage... — Eyden I.

Watching Temar, I wondered how the animals of the King's menagerie felt, able to kill any of the puny beings that looked into their cages, yet bound back by bars of iron. I felt a strange darkness at the thought. I had no true cage, save my own thoughts. There was nothing to keep me from lashing out at any of the nobles who walked these halls. It seemed like a very thin barrier all of a sudden. — Moira Katson

Hanging from every corner, above every window, standing on every shelf and tabletop, were dozens of handmade birdcages. Nomi had crafted them all, mostly out of old fishing twine, scraps of nets, and chicken wire. Woven in between the bars of the cages were bits of seashells, crab shells, pebbles, and driftwood she had scavenged along the beach. In a pinch she had made a few out of old clothes hangers she had scissored apart and woven together with strips of a negligee or shirt. Each one was personal, each one was unique, each one was a story — Brooke Warra

I have been there, and I have seen these totally formed babies as early as ten weeks ... with the leg missing, or with their head off. I have seen the little rib cages ... — Deborah Priya Henry

That?" I glanced back to the door where JT had disappeared. "That was Genus Homo, species Whowantstofuckus, subspecies Closeted Headup Hisassia. Let us move on to the cages with the interesting animals."
Jacob "Yasha" Livingston — Z.A. Maxfield

I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread. — Isaac Marion

There were upsides to the whole mess. While Douglas was holding me hostage, I'd met a girl - I mean, screw dating websites and house parties; apparently all the really eligible ladies are being held in cages these days. I would have liked to see Brid fill out a dating questionnaire, though. What would she put? "Hi, my name is Bridin Blackthorn. I'm next in line to rule the local werewolf pack. I like long walks on the beach and destroying my enemies. I have four older brothers, so watch your step. We'll be forming a queue to the left for potential suitors."
And, trust me, there would be a queue. — Lish McBride

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage. — Khalil Gibran

If there was anything she had learned from her mother, it was the painful understanding that cages come in all sizes - some even have white picket fences, four walls, and a front door. — Jamie Ford

I - a philosopher - live in the cage of flesh and blood. — Kedar Joshi

It greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweeping up dogs' hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me, that people would feel the world owed me distinctness. — Saul Bellow

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days. — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.
The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on. — Rana Dasgupta

I just wore a cage my whole career coming up, and didn't feel a reason not to have some type of protection. — Brian Leetch

Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages. — Matthew Quick

one look his fears of a dog-fighting ring were valid. Blood was spattered around a makeshift wooden ring. Chains were piled up in a corner. He could see where the cages had been placed in the grass by the indents, but they were gone now. A dead cat was dangling from a tree branch. — Kathleen Brooks

She reminded Juliet of the parrot the shopkeeper owned. Both the woman and bird belonged in cages, preferably the same cage, so the bird could poop on all that velvet and lace. — Jordan Elizabeth Mierek

In the beginning, we were ordinary street rats, stealing our daily bread, and living off the efforts of man's work. We were captured, put in cages, and sent to a place called NIMH. There were other animals there, in cages. They were put through the most unspeakable torture, to satisfy some scientific curiosity. Often, at night, I would hear them cry out in anguish. Twenty rats and eleven mice were given injections. Our world began changing. — Nicodemus

Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again. — Harold Frederic

If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks. — Geneen Roth

Humans are born free then put into cages, then convinced freedom is what being in a cage is, and what freedom is, is being in a cage. — Craig Stone

That parrot's non-co-operation with the cage, with its master, will live for ever because it looks upon renunciation, non-co-operation, as a joy. — Mahatma Gandhi

But if monsters could look like humans, and humans could look like monsters, how could anyone ever really be sure that the right people stood on the outside of all those cages? — Rachel Vincent

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon. — Morton Feldman

Defend the Bible? I'd sooner defend a lion. You don't defend the Bible; you open its cage and let it roar. — Charles Spurgeon

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko

We fly into our own gilded cages and then bemoan the bars. — Angela Darling

BEASTON: Strong women don't do well in cages. — T.S. Joyce

Tires. Drums. Steel cages.
Your place is like Disneyland! — Geonard Yleana

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed. — Greg Egan

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated. — Brian Eno

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

As for the cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy. — Peter Singer

It's impossible to own a Norin, no matter how many cages you wrap around them. We will always follow our own star. The best you can do is to hope you've pinned your heart to the same constellation. — Gwynn White

The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

The safari was amazing, to actually see the elephants and the Lions up close and then right at the end to actually get in the cage with the Lion was one of the best moments of the tour. — Ugo Monye

In the cage there is food, not much, but there is food-outside are only great stretches of freedom. — Nicanor Parra

Behind us are two or three dozen country people from the outlying towns. With them are cages of chicken and goats, sheep, even cattle. That's where we fit on market day. Between the executions and the livestock sales. — Kristen Simmons

How can a bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? — William Blake

The way to reason with a predator is to make it aware that it can live in a cage, or it can die, but it can no longer prey upon us. — Massad Ayoob

Always we try to put the wild in a cage. — John Fowles

I think that, generally, people of the world typify a "free and wild" person as someone who's uprooted, detached and uninhibited. But I don't believe in that kind of freedom. I think that's an infantile concept. Freedom means something when it has escaped something! Those people who escaped things - their inner cages, cages set by others around them - when those people are able to roam free and say, "This is who I am because this is who I choose to be", THAT is freedom. Freedom isn't being stupid; freedom is being so smart that you develop a strength strong enough to break free and become your own person. A better person than what your circumstances would like to define you as. — C. JoyBell C.

In this job it's like beasts of prey in a cage — Marcelo Rios

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. — Carl Sagan

When you considered this world
people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gaps of fire from the planet's core
it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were. — Martin Amis

He always had some experiment or another on the go, usually involving boiling liquids and unpleasant smells. Always something bubbling in the cauldron or cooking in the small stone oven. One wall was hidden behind rows of metal cages, set one upon the other; containing animals and birds and reptiles and a few other things not so easily identified. Because you never knew when you'd need a subject to try something out on. And of course there were shelves and shelves of glass jars, holding herbs and insect parts, mandrake root and other disturbing things. Some of the things in the jars were still moving. Because alchemy's like that. — Simon R. Green

I imagine him grown up and finished with med school, patients lying on the operating table - reaching inside people's rib cages, fixing their broken hearts. — Katie Cotugno

Imprisoned in a cage of sound, even the trivial seems profound — John Betjeman

A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity. — Vance Havner

There's this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis," she explained. "It says that the more competent an individual is in his field - the more respected he is in the community - the more his eccentric behavior will be tolerated by others. "But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that's even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity." I — John Elder Robison

The thief-catcher looked as if he would rather clean the cages with his bare hands. The lions' cages, with the lions inside. — Robert Jordan

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper. — D.H. Lawrence

Such lonely, lost things you find on your way. It would be easier, if you were the only one lost. But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized and can only attract their like. How I would like to lead you to brave, stalwart friends who would protect you and play games with dice and teach you delightful songs that have no sad endings. If you would only leave cages locked and turn away from unloved Wyverns, you could stay Heartless. — Catherynne M Valente

Great towns are but a large sort of prison to the soul; like cages to birds, or pounds to beasts. — Pierre Charron

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Gospel is like a caged lion. It does not need to be defended, it just needs to be let out of its cage. — Charles Spurgeon

Bird cages are nothing of incredible value, but I like them. — Elsa Peretti

When I was 5, someone thought it was smart to let me watch The People Under the Stairs. It might not have even been that scary, but I do remember skinned people in cages under the stairs and a man who lived in a wall without a tongue ... and that's why I cry after sex. — Ellen Page

Let them go, I tell myself. Say good-bye and forget them. I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return. — Suzanne Collins

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. — Dalai Lama

His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. — Angela Carter

Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called Christianity. — Rob Bell

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another's audience outside the gilded cage — Neil Peart

I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage ... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art. — Jasper Johns

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the beautiful rowdy prisoners. — Hafez

You have escaped the cage. Your wings are stretched out. Now fly. — Rumi

If you think I'm afraid of the steel cage ... YOU'RE RIGHT! Please God, don't make me go into the cage! — Stevie Richards

There was no one else to blame anymore. No Bores or Old Ladies or Nortons, or Assassins waiting at the bridge. And there was no place to hide-no place across any river for a boatman to take us.
Our life would be what we made of it-nothing more, nothing less.
Baboons.
Baboons.
They build their own cages, we could almost hear the Pigman whisper, as he took his children with him. — Paul Zindel

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars. — Andre Gide

We weren't so different, Finn and I. Cages come in lots of colors and shapes. Some are gilded, while others have a slamming door. But golden handcuffs are still handcuffs. — Amy Harmon

I was sure I wanted to grow up to be either a veterinarian or a writer. In fact, I worked for a vet during high school, doing everything from cleaning cages to assisting in surgery. — K.A. Applegate