“We are most artistically caged.”

“What is this thing called the existence? Is it all the things that we perceive it to be? Or is it something else? It's a gift. One of my favorite examples is the bird in the cage. You may think that you own the bird inside the cage, but you're wrong. You only own the cage. People think that they need to have a very fancy cage, that the more incredible the cage, the more incredible the bird will look. But the cage and the bird are really two different things. When the bird is gone, all that will be left is the cage.”

“Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.”

“Précisément! The body — the cage — is everything of the most respectable — but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”

“I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)”

“John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.”

“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…”

“Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.”

“The task facing ARAs is daunting: we must empty the cages, not make them larger.”

“Put people in a cage and they will devote themselves to escaping it, not cooperating with those who caged them.”