Quotes About Confinement

There is a story about a prisoner in Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely.

a name is almost always a sort of cowardice---an attempt to confine a thing to being only what it is, rather than what it may be.

Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature? Are we always imprisoned, eternally imprisoned, in body, in place, in community, do even our minds imprison us? What would it be like to be free, even for a second? Is that death? Do we live only in that final moment when we flee our shape?

the doors securely closed.

We live in rooms too much, I say. We think too much in rooms. We make love too much in rooms. We despair too much in rooms. Can you despair in the open?

Safe in his cage,' she repeated. 'Who wants to be safe in a cage?

He sensed a rising "hysteria" among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief "that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.

every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….

one of the great dangers of life is too much possibility, and that the place where we find people who have succumbed to this danger is the madhouse

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

Nu vedeti, am spus, toti sînt închisi în sicrie transparente.

Sînt deja închis. Cum sînt toti. Închis si totodata prea liber.

And you're sucking up all our oxygen in here for what reason?

Unfortunately, there are so many people who live their whole life in a place that is safe and protected and simple and they don't really have that strength inside to fly.

Las palabras son hijas de la carne y como tales se pudren si se las guarda encerradas.

Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.

as if your essence were hung up in a closet like a dress too good to be worn and you were reduced to going out in only your appearance.

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.

she was doomed to luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons.

Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.

He was so restless and he had so much energy, but it was destructive. Like it wasn't the sort of energy that got walls painted or the house cleaned. He just prowled like a lion in a cage.