Quotes about cage (262 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Bird

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

As quoted in Investing with Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good (2016) by Jeremy Balkin

Powerful , Bird , Thinking , Flying

“A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages”

Tennessee Williams Stairs to the Roof

This is the subtitle of the play
Source: Stairs to the Roof (1941)

Heart

“The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can't have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I'd rather not be in a cage. I'd rather be dead. And it's real simple. And I think it's not that uncommon.”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter

Love , Truth , Feeling , Thinking

“Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“… But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will tun wild and cause you grief.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

“How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring?”

William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Source: Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Youth , Fear , Spring , Bird

“The Word of God can take care of itself, and will do so if we preach it, and cease defending it. See you that lion. They have caged him for his preservation; shut him up behind iron bars to secure him from his foes! See how a band of armed men have gathered together to protect the lion. What a clatter they make with their swords and spears! These mighty men are intent upon defending a lion. O fools, and slow of heart! Open that door! Let the lord of the forest come forth free. Who will dare to encounter him? What does he want with your guardian care? Let the pure gospel go forth in all its lion-like majesty, and it will soon clear its own way and ease itself of its adversaries.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

The Lover of God's Law Filled with Peace (January 1888) http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols34-36/chs2004.pdf

Men , God , Fools , Way

“While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like The International Times. We opened the Indica gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece of music called 4’33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed he would say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence—it’s music.’ I was intrigued by all of that. So these things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen; one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses—most of the time, anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 212

Life , People , Art , Music

“People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.
I do know that there is a release, the belated release.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)
Context: People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.
I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

People

“The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He is in front of it.”

Axel Munthe (1857–1949) Swedish physician

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

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Despite all my rage
I am still just a rat in the cage.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

Rage

“Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.”

Bruce Lee book Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Variant: All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
Source: Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Truth

“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

People , Literature

“A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.”

Sharon Creech Walk Two Moons

Source: Walk Two Moons

Bird , Personality

“You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.”

Terry Pratchett book Witches Abroad

Source: Witches Abroad (1991)

People , World , Girl

“You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.”

Terry Pratchett book Witches Abroad

Source: Witches Abroad

People , World

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

“The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

16
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Variant: A cage went in search of a bird.

Search , Bird

“Being in love, you know… it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.”

Sarah Waters book Tipping the Velvet

Source: Tipping the Velvet

Love

“We are most artistically caged.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

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

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

Art , Democracy , Science

“Before he died, Guru Govind Singh had commissioned Banda Bairagi, a Rajput from Jammu to go to the Punjab and punish the wrong-doers. Banda more than fulfilled his mission. He was joined by fresh formations of the Khalsa and the Hindus at large gave him succour and support. He roamed all over the Punjab, defeating one Muslim army after another in frontal fights as well as in guerilla warfare. Sirhind, where Guru Govind Singh's younger sons had been walled up, was stormed and sacked. The bullies of Islam who had walked with immense swagger till only the other day had to run for cover. Large parts of the Punjab were liberated from Muslim despotism after a spell of nearly seven centuries. The Mughal empire, however, was still a mighty edifice which could mobilize a military force far beyond Banda's capacity to match. Gradually, he had to yield ground and accept defeat as his own following thinned down in battle after battle. He was captured, carried to Delhi in an iron cage and tortured to death in 1716 A. D. Many other members of the Khalsa met the same fate in Delhi and elsewhere. The Muslim governor of the Punjab had placed a prize on every Khalsa head. The ranks of the Khalsa had perforce to suffer a steep decline and go into hiding.”

Banda Singh Bahadur (1670–1716) Sikh military commander

Swarup, Ram, & Goel, S. R. (1985). Hindu-Sikh relationship. (Introduction by S.R. Goel)

Death , Fate , Support , Suffering

“Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out, I can be king of Olaf-Land, and you three can be my new henchfolk.”

Daniel Handler book The End

Source: The End (2006), Chapter 7

Secret , World , Way

“My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e. g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something – in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another"”

Brian Eno (1948) English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist

a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts).
December 15, 1995, p. 178
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Music

“Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.”

Marilyn Frye (1941) feminist philosopher and professor

"Oppression", in Politics Of Reality – Essays In Feminist Theory (1983)

Way , Bird , Time , Past

“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

As quoted at Penn State University Libraries http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/wlolita.htm.
On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)

Animals , Drawing

“Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Sometimes ascribed to Robert Browning, this is in fact a misquotation from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): "They [i.e. ambitious men] may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain, so Budaeus compares them; they climb and climb still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top".
Misattributed

Men , Dogs , Bird

“God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.”

Jacques Deval (1890–1972) French film director and writer

Quoted in Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell, A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations (1992), p. 22

Love , God , Bird , Tree

“All these animals are put in cages, never see the sun or grass, and they leave this hell only to go to the slaughter-house. For me intensive breeding is a sign of human degeneration. If one can find that acceptable, then we humans have lost all moral value. … [How long have you been a vegetarian? ] Since 1962, when I went on French television to denounce conditions of animal slaughter. That is when I became aware of the horror of factory farming, live transports and the killings of farm animals. I have always been sensitive to animal distress but from then on I refused to be involved in such inhuman industrial deaths.”

Brigitte Bardot (1934) French model, actor, singer and animal rights activist

" Brigitte Bardot: 'I became aware of the horror of factory farming http://www.evana.org/index.php?id=51041&lang=en". Interview for Primorske novice (November 2009) as reported by European Vegetarian and Animal News Alliance (EVANA) website

Death , Hell , Grass , Sun

“Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer's shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled-up wares, neatly and appetizingly laid out, when I became aware of a man at the side busily plucking a hen, while another man was just putting his hand in a cage, where he seized a live hen and tore its head off. The hideous scream of the animal, and the pitiful, weaker sounds of complaint that it made while being overpowered transfixed my soul with horror. Ever since then I have been unable to rid myself of this impression, although I had experienced it often before. It is dreadful to see how our lives—which, on the whole, remain addicted to pleasure—rest upon such a bottomless pit of the cruellest misery! This has been so self-evident to me from the very beginning, and has become even more central to my thinking as my sensibility has increased … I have observed the way in which I am drawn in the [direction of empathy for misery] with a force that inspires me with sympathy, and that everything touches me deeply only insofar as it arouses fellow-feeling in me, i. e. fellow-suffering. I see in this fellow-suffering the most salient feature of my moral being, and presumably it is this that is the well-spring of my art.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, translated by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), pp. 422-424 http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/wagner02.htm

Pleasure , Art , Way , Feeling

“Is it one wid this you'd be, Yank — black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks — the bloody engines pounding and throbbing and shaking — wid divil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air — choking our lungs wid coal dust — breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole — feeding the bloody furnace — feeding our lives along wid the coal, I'm thinking — caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!”

Eugene O'Neill The Hairy Ape

Paddy: Scene 1
The Hairy Ape (1922)

Hell , Thinking , Sun , Heart

“The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”

Desmond Morris book The Human Zoo

Desmond Morris (2009), The Human Zoo, p. vii

Animals

“They remind us that he is a great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But "a living dog is better than a dead lion." Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)
Context: There are those who denounce us openly to their own friends and yet whisper us softly, that Senator Douglas is the aptest instrument there is with which to effect that object. They wish us to infer all this from the fact that he now has a little quarrel with the present head of the dynasty; and that he has regularly voted with us on a single point upon which he and we have never differed. They remind us that he is a great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But "a living dog is better than a dead lion." Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He does not care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the "public heart" to care nothing about it. A leading Douglas Democratic newspaper thinks Douglas's superior talent will be needed to resist the revival of the African slave-trade. Does Douglas believe an effort to revive that trade is approaching? He has not said so. Does he really think so? But if it is, how can he resist it? For years he has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into the new Territories. Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought cheapest? And unquestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia. He has done all in his power to reduce the whole question of slavery to one of a mere right of property; and as such, how can he oppose the foreign slave trade — how can he refuse that trade in that "property" shall be "perfectly free" — unless he does it as a protection to the home production? And as the home producers will probably not ask the protection, he will be wholly without a ground of opposition.

Dogs , Dead

“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Heart , Animals

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

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Miserables

Soul , Bird , Help

“You can't cage an eagle for long without destroying it.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Dragon Blood

“How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much. As cages go, it is a gilded one, but I shall not live well in it or any cage, for that matter.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Feeling

“Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book III, Ch. 5
Attributed
Source: The Complete Essays

Marriage , Bird

“Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Sunflower

Feeling , Animals

“She is like the wind, open and free. If I cage the wind, would it die?
-Then don't cage it, Mikhail. Trust it to stay beside you.”

Christine Feehan book Dark Prince

Source: Dark Prince

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

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

People

“Not if we blow it up," Gale says brusquely. His intent, his full intent, becomes clear. Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the pray for later use.
This is one of his death traps.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Death

“Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All Be Feminists

Source: We Should All Be Feminists
Source: https://sheleadsafrica.org/20-powerful-chimamanda-adichie-quotes-for-todays-boss-women/

Boy

“Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, then live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Truth

“May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Health , Reading , Weather

“« Barabas pulled Christopher out of the cage. The man stared up at him. “I died, didn’t I? Are you an angel?”
“Sure,” Barabas said. “Follow me to the Heavenly Shower »”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Rises

Angels

“What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: 1Q84 BOOK 1

Personality

“Love your rage, not your cage.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta

Love , Rage

“When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.

But it's a lie.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

People , Lie , Hurt

“Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book The warrior's Apprentice

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Beauty

“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Hate , Fate , Learning , Time

“Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage.”

Ed Brubaker (1966) comic book writer and cartoonist

Parting

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Bird

“I say if you love something, set it in a small cage and pester and smother it with love until it either loves you back or dies.”

Mindy Kaling (1979) actress, writer, comedian

Love

“Mom and Dad had a lot to answer for, she decided. She couldn’t even be rude to evil
vampires who’d caged her boyfriend and were preparing to roast him alive.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: The Dead Girls' Dance

Moms , Evil

“How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Bird , Singing , Joy

“A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Heart

“Friends don’t build cages for each other.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

Source: A Spy in the House of Love

Dreams , Bird

“When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

Thinking , Fight , Sincerity

“Leo dropped into the pool and approched the cage. "Hola, Tia. Little bit of trouble?"
She [Hera] crossed her arms and sighed in exasperation. "Don't inspect me like I'm one of your machines, Leo Valdez. Get me out of here!”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“That was what happened to laughter when you caged it. It became unbearably sad. It was worse than crying.”

Isobelle Carmody book Greylands

Source: Greylands

Sadness , Laughter , Cry

“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 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Fear , Bird , Freedom , Distant

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

The Meadow (1947), originally a radio play for the World Security Workshop; later revised into a short story for this anthology.
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Dependency

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

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

People , Feeling , Thinking

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

Lewis Hyde (1945) American writer

Source: Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

Time

“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 The Hunger Games

Katniss, p. 189
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Bird , Thinking , Forgetting

“Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“A woman who’s lived in a cage all her life. And hates it. Bored in there, aren’t you. Waiting for life to happen. And when it finally does, it steals from you what you loved most. So take back. Explode. Lash out. Blow up”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Alpha Alternative: JZB Sex Scene

Love , Life , Hate , Waiting

“Child of lightning, beware the earth,
The giants' revenge the seven shall birth,
The forge and the dove shall break the cage,
And death unleash through Hera's rage.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Death , Birth , Revenge , Rage

“Whether you’re beaten or pampered, fed the best foods or starved, kept in filth or kept clean, a cage is still a cage.”

Anne Bishop book Written in Red

Source: Written in Red

Food

“I know because I read… Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Reading

“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 (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist

Source: Insecure at Last

Home , Thinking

“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 the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 15: Threats

Bird , Time

“There's a lot of mental illness in my family. So, if you catch schizophrenia, get four boxes of Mike and Ikes, a Bible, and a cage. Wait it out.”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome (2009)

Family , Waiting , Box

“I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect... The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of the laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears, and in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

Quote in Courbet's letter to Victor Hugo, 28 November 1864; as cited in Chu, Letters, p. 249; quoted in 'Paysages de Mer - Courbet's The Wave', by Anthony White https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/paysages-de-mer-courbets-the-wave/
1860s

Sadness , Mountain , Mood , Thinking

“She knows I'm a deserter from the Scottish Fusiliers,
She knows I stole a blind-man's can…that got me seven years!
She knows I've been connected with a gang of West-End Pests,
And the police have had me twice inside the cage;
And she knows I mix with ladies that have got a shady past,
But my mother doesn't know I'm on the stage.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

"My Mother Doesn't Know I'm on the Stage", line 11

Past

“You're going to be roped!
And you're going to be caged!
And, as for your dust speck – hah!
That we shall boil in a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut Oil!”

Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who!

Horton Hears a Who! (1954)

“T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.”

John Webster The White Devil

Act I, scene ii. Compare: "To public feasts, where meet a public rout,— Where they that are without would fain go in, And they that are within would fain go out", John Davies, Contention betwixt a Wife, etc.
The White Devil (1612)

Fear , Bird , Summer , Despair

“John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Painting

“Object in/ and space – the first impulse may be to give the object – a position – to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with). Next – to change the position of the object. – Rauschenberg's early sculptures – A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden – The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden)..”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Book C (sketchbook), c. 1970; as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 70
1970s

Change

“Rama, Rama, Rama chant, this grand
Lord’s name do not forget in mind
With nine orifices this jam-packed city
Five kings ruling there with all majesty
They guard this body with all the vanity
Do not get spoiled believing this mendacity.
This insecure body, just a bony cage
Tightly wrapped with a cover of skin
Full of sewage, slush, and germs within
Do not rely on this sewn up cartilage
Respected by the recurring Brahmas and celestials
Take Hari’s name with His supreme credentials
Pray the feet of Purandara Vittala
And get rid of the fear of the evils all.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

This is an allegorical song in which Dasa refers to the nine openings of the body to the city and the five kings relate to the five universal elements of fire, air, water, earth and space. Degradable wastes are within the body which all binds us to this world. And to seek salvation he advices to take the name of God. This quote is here[Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 87]

Fear , Evil , Forgetting