Trapped In A Cage Quotes

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.

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

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.

This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far. It

Hello? This is Clary Fairchild.” “Clary? It’s me, Emma.” “Oh, Emma, hi! I haven’t heard from you in ages. My mom says thanks for the wedding flowers, by the way. She wanted to send a note but Luke whisked her away on a honeymoon to Tahiti.” “Tahiti sounds nice.” “It probably is — Jace, what are you doing with that thing? There is no way it’ll fit.” “Is this a bad time?” “What? No! Jace is trying to drag a trebuchet into the training room. Alec, stop helping him.” “What’s a trebuchet?” “It’s a huge catapult.” “What are they going to use it for?” “I have no idea. Alec, you’re enabling! You’re an enabler!” “Maybe it is a bad time.” “I doubt there’ll be a better one. Is something wrong? Is there anything I can do?” “I think we have your cat.” “What?” “Your cat. Big fuzzy Blue Persian? Always looks angry? Julian says it’s your cat. He says he saw it at the New York Institute. Well, saw him. It’s a boy cat.” “Church? You have Church? But I thought — well, we knew he was gone. We thought Brother Zachariah took him. Isabelle was annoyed, but they seemed to know each other. I’ve never seen Church actually likeanyone like that.” “I don’t know if he likes anyone here. He bit Julian twice. Oh, wait. Julian says he likes Ty. He’s asleep on Ty’s bed.” “How did you wind up with him?” “Someone rang our front doorbell. Diana, she’s our tutor, went down to see what it was. Church was in a cage on the front step with a note tied to it. It said For Emma. This is Church, a longtime friend of the Carstairs. Take care of this cat and he will take care of you. —J.” “Brother Zachariah left you a cat.” “But I don’t even really know him. And he’s not a Silent Brother any more.” “You may not know him, but he clearly knows you.” “What do you think the J stands for?” “His real name. Look, Emma, if he wants you to have Church, and you want Church, you should keep him.” “Are you sure? The Lightwoods —“ ‘They’re both standing here nodding. Well, Alec is partially trapped under a trebuchet, but he seems to be nodding.” “Jules says we’d like to keep him. We used to have a cat named Oscar, but he died, and, well, Church seems to be good for Ty’s nightmares.” “Oh, honey. I think, really, he’s Brother Zachariah’s cat. And if he wants you to have him, then you should.” “Why does Brother Zachariah want to protect me? It’s like he knows me, but I don’t know why he knows me.” “I don’t exactly know … But I know Tessa. She’s his — well, girlfriend seems not the right word for it. They’ve known each other a long, long time. I have a feeling they’re both watching over you.” “That’s good. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.” “Emma — oh my God. The trebuchet just crashed through the floor. I have to go. Call me later.” “But we can keep the cat?” “You can keep the cat.

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

There’s something simmering inside of me. Something I’ve never dared to tap into, something I’m afraid to acknowledge. There’s a part of me clawing to break free from the cage I’ve trapped it in, banging on the doors of my heart, begging to be free. Begging to let go. Every day I feel like I’m reliving the same nightmare. I open my mouth to shout, to fight, to swing my fists, but my vocal cords are cut, my arms are heavy and weighted down as if trapped in wet cement and I’m screaming but no one can hear me, no one can reach me and I’m caught. And it’s killing me. I’ve always had to make myself submissive, subservient, twisted into a pleading, passive mop just to make everyone else feel safe and comfortable. My existence has become a fight to prove I’m harmless, and I’m not a threat, that I’m capable of living among other human beings without hurting them. And I’m so tired I’m so tire I’m so tired I’m so tired and sometimes I get so angry. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

5. Then on a rainy day in early July the words she was copying from one of Martha the Benevolent’s ancient sayings spoke to her: Birds fly free until they are put in a cage, but the cage does not bind their wings When the cage is opened, the wings spread out, and the bird flies free again So the poor are trapped in a cage by the avarice of the rich Not in a cage made of gold, but one of hunger, despair and need So the prisoner dreams of the wide open spaces Wind in her hair, breathing in the freedom, beyond the four walls of her cell Our mission is to free the prisoner, to help the poor to spread their wings To open the door of the oppressor’s cage, to find a way to a fairer age.

punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

When it's like this, I don't notice the cold. I don't hear the wind howling through the empty spaces. I don't feel like a small, broken-winged bird trapped in a rusty cage.

They have elevated him on a pedestal, but...a pedestal is nothing more than an elegant cage. No walls, no locks, but unless one has wings to fly away, one is trapped. A pedestal is the most insidious prison ever devised.

You can never trust anyone once you've had to trap them in a cage.

I scroll past images every bit as violent and beautiful as Jeb's paintings: luminious, rainbow-skinned creatures with bulbous eyes and sparkly, silken wings who carry knives and swords; hideous, naked hobgoblins in chains who crawl on all fours and have corkscrew tails and cloven feet like pigs; silvery pixielike beings trapped in cages and crying oily black tears.

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.

He towered over her, as intense and savage as only he could be, making her feel small and delicate in comparison, surrounded by his utter maleness. She felt trapped and she wanted to stay in his cage forever.

What keeps you trapped?...What keeps you from living the life you want? What keeps you from being free?

In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped. Just like me.

Maven is a talented liar, and I don't trust a single word he speaks. Even if he was telling the truth. Even if he is a product of his mother's meddling, a thorned flower forced to grow a certain way. That doesn't change things. I can't forget everything he's done to me and so many others. When I first met him, I was seduced by his pain. He was the boy in shadow, a forgotten son. I saw myself in him. Second always to Gisa, the bright star in my parents' world. I know now that was by design. He caught me back then, ensnaring me in a prince's trap. Now I'm in a king's cage. But so is he. My chains are Silent Stone. His is the crown.

We are the wise. Do not envy us— We who are too wise to draw near the fire Lest we get burned; We who are too wise to love Lest love should vanish and we be hurt. We are the wise. Do not envy us our wisdom— We who are too wise to live Lest we should die.

That was torture--being able to see, and smell, and hear, and being trapped in a cage. Like standing on the wrong side of the fence, only a few feet from freedom, and knowing you'll never cross it. Yeah. Like that.

Galina, you’re akin to a bird trapped in a cage, yearning for freedom but unable to attain it... To preserve your spirit, you must break free from those constraints and soar.

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.

You are Fire! Don’t believe these mere mortals. They want to put you on a pedestal and sing paeans to you; later they would burn you in the altar of that same fire! Stand away and stand alone! You are limitless! But these mortals can only limit your sky! You are the Universe! But they will only give you a little space! Break free! It’s a trap! They want to cage you! Because, they are afraid of your real power! You are a woman. You are the fire! You are all conquering. You are all powerful! You are Supreme! You were not born to be a mere beauty queen!!

The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.

Break free from the binding robes of passion that feels like a lump in your heart, perform that surgery today, and you'll be set free forever.

Women like her are worse than the men they serve. They cling hardest to the very rules that cage them, ruthlessly ensuring that all other women are equally trapped.

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

The future is trapped in a cage opened only by the key of genius.

You can’t stop the bad things from happening—to yourself, to your brother, to any of us. I know because I’ve lived the same as you, trying to keep my life small. Really all I did was build myself a cage. And then I trapped myself inside that cage and told myself the bars weren’t real.

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?

One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11

I felt like one who wants to trap and cage a little bird, and after years of waiting and luring and baiting finds that she must do no more than hold out her hand, and the finch lands on her finger and does not fly. You scarcely dare to move. It rests on your hand whole and free, foolishly trusting and infinitely courageous. It will never be more beautiful.

Strange, how armor could be both a shield and a cage, keeping the arrows out while trapping the monster in.

Humans were trapped in a box of their own construction: mental prisons caging us from a universe of possibilities.

Today, the practice of cosmetic medicine is one that walks the line between empowering women to control their bodies and trapping them in a gilded cage of punishing beauty standards.

She knew what he offered. He would kill her first, with the gun or the knife or his fists if he had to, and make certain she was never trapped in that cage again. From another man this might be terrifying, that he would so blithely consider murdering his companion. But she understood that from Hatcher this was tantamount to an offer of marriage. This was what he could do for her, how he showed he cared.

But even then, I could trap those thoughts and keep them caged in a corner of my mind, in a place where they could not spread their wings and take over my life.

You think I’m perfect, but I feel like a songbird trapped in a cage.

As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors—doors by which we on the inside lock out "the others"—Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever. The more we insiders succeed in shutting others out, the more I tend to feel locked in, caged, trapped.

This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.

I was a bird trapped inside a cage that I thought I'd been released from, still confined and limited to where I could fly. I'd been holding up my umbrella to avoid the rain but I never stopped the rain from falling.

On the third day, my room became a cell, which became a cage, which became a coffin, and I discovered the very deepest fear that swam through my heart like eels in undersea caves: to be locked away, trapped and alone.

I feel like I'm seeing a sparrow in a cage, something young and innocent trapped by grasping hands. And I think that perhaps my own cage is simply larger than hers, so large I have never been fully aware of its edges.

I still didn’t know quite what the witches were capable of. The threshold could be booby-trapped or enchanted. I could be walking into a cage fight with a demon. Hell, she could open the door with a Glock 9 in her hand and put a bullet in my ear, or throw a cat at me, or call me a damn hippie.

For many years I paced around my cage, my dreams filled with murder and revenge. Until the day when the solution finally presented itself to me, like something that was completely obvious: Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?

If it were up to him, he'd keep Jack locked in a cage forever, where no one could get to him and he'd always be safe. But much as he might want to, much as he'd sleep better knowing that Jack was safe, he couldn't do that. "Safe" could quickly come to mean "trapped". And trapped things tended to want to escape.

Kiva has spent over half her life locked in a nightmare. The last thing I want is to make her feel like she’s trapped in another kind of cage, gilded though it might be. I have no idea what the future will bring for us, but right now she deserves the chance to live her life and follow her dreams. I can only hope she’ll grant me the honor of being by her side on that journey, and if she does, you’ll have to find a way to deal with it. I don’t think I can be any clearer than that.

As the body rots, so does the cage that traps us in our wordly concerns. When my legs become too weak to carry my body, I stopped pacing with worry. When my fingers became twisted, I stopped pointing blame. When I lost my sight, I stopped seeing illusions. It may be dark in the pot that I am simmering in, but I can see more clearly than I have ever seen in my life.

Creative people have it hard. There is always something trapped in their noggins yearning to escape like a caged animal, both too free and wild to contain. Little does the world know it will often scrape the inner walls of the mind until it gets what it wants.

He caught me back then, ensnaring me in a prince’s trap. Now I’m in a king’s cage. But so is he. My chains are Silent Stone. His is the crown.

No wonder they mistake this for peace. I want to scream at every Red face I pass. I want to carve the words on my body so everyone has to see. Trap. Lie. Conspiracy.

My heart, trapped in a cage For the hope that one day I’m allowed to say your name

Monkeys are dangerous animals. Don't be fooled by the cute exterior," Eve said like she was imparting some sage wisdom. "Look," I explained, "I'm sure those monkeys were just mad about something like being trapped in a cage or being forced to wear velvet vests and dance to accordion music.

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage. One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body. Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.

They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, "The lion is caged at last!" Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! —Old Ballad.

If you’re trapped in a cage, you don’t want to start being grateful for the protection of the bars. You need to be grateful that there are gaps in between them so you can see what’s on the other side.

He skims his fingers across my neck to move aside my long braid, and I try not to remember the protective look on his face from earlier or notice his earthy scent or the way my rib cage squirms as he leans in, like I’ve got a trapped butterfly in there.

The prophecy, like an angered beast, had gone berserk and was destroying his mind with the ferocity of madness . . . until all that he knew, all that was him, all that had become him was left in disarray. To my brother, Ikenna, the fear of death as prophesied by Abulu had become palpable, a caged world within which he was irretrievably trapped, and beyond which nothing else existed.

Don’t spend your life worried about what people think of you, Margot. That kind of fear is like a cage—it will trap you forever if you’re not careful.

Sometimes we have spent so long in the cage that it feels safer to be trapped inside.

The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

I live in a cage, but I’ve never felt so trapped.

Afraid she’ll forget herself as easily as others do, unaware that her mind is now a flawless cage, her memory a perfect trap. She will never forget, though she'll wish she could.

Sometimes we women are our own worst traps. Our hopes snatch us like quicksand. Our loneliness forges a cage. Sometimes all it takes is one sweet glance and kind word to make us forget ourselves.

of her favorites was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: . . . all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. Kya recalled a poem written by a lesser-known poet, Amanda Hamilton, published recently in the local newspaper she’d bought at the Piggly Wiggly: Trapped inside, Love is a caged beast, Eating its own flesh. Love must be free to wander, To land upon its chosen shore And breathe.

In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to every one, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellowmen, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained to behave that way. When she meets no resistance she falls headlong into the trap. To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without firs traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyzer, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage…

Experiments show that a free rat will instinctively work to free another rat trapped inside a plastic bottle. But once that free rat has been allowed to self-administer heroin, it is no longer interested in helping out the caged rat, presumably too caught up in an opioid haze to care about a fellow member of its species.

I'm trying to keep you safe." Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn't want to feel safe, or that Nolan's worry didn't leave her feeling warm and even a bit precious. But it also left her feeling trapped, like an ornamental bird kept in a cage, its wings clipped.

It’s dangerous to be grateful for the cage that traps you.

FLIGHT OF FOLLY. WOMAN TRAPPED IN CAGE OF OPEN DOORS.

Society is the same weather English, French, or Creole. One uses it as guidelines; never should it become a cage. - Celeste Talbot

Trapped inside, Love is a caged beast, Eating its own flesh. Love must be free to wander, To land upon its chosen shore And breathe.

I sweep out of the cage like I’m shucking off a weight. I can’t imagine being trapped in there for hours or days. For weeks, months, years… How did she stand it?

To anyone trapped in a cage. Break free, spread your wings. May your flight be long.

Accept that you’re not the same person you were, but don’t pity yourself. Self-pity doesn’t turn back time. That’s like being trapped in a cage while life goes on,

I’ve studied the humans for almost twenty years, Rachner. They’ve been traveling in space for hundreds of generations. They’ve seen so much, they’ve done so much…. The poor crappers think they know what is impossible. They’re free to fly between the stars, and their imagination is trapped in a cage they can’t even see.” The glowing streaks had passed across the

We are somewhat like animals in a cage, the fundamental difference between them and us is that our cage doors are actually open, but we fail to recognise the cage, nor the doors to freedom.

Two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers living in an insane asylum... They were cheered by the tiniest of things... It was outrageous. Fortunately, time was something they had a great deal of and they made good use of it.

Irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde…”Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground clearing…. Irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. That was it exactly—Irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.

Hurt has nothing to do with love, and love is unaffiliated with and unaffected by pain. We say, “My heart is full of love,” but love is not bound in our heart or our relationships, and thus, it is not caged and capable of being poked, taunted, or trapped. And no amount of love—no matter the pain or hurt—is ever

Tamsin tucked the love into the left-hand corner of her rib cage, trying to corral it as best she could—although, of course, love could never truly be controlled. It was like trying to trap flies in a birdcage.

You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine.” “I’m afraid so.” “Why again exactly, now?” “I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.” “Why?” “Why? I guess to give my life some sort of meaning, Lyle.” “And how would this do this again?” “Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?” “You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.” “I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?” “The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.” “Lyle, don’t they?” “LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.” “Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.” “LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?” “Okey-dokey.” “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” “Maybe I ought to be getting back.” “LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.” “Animal?” “You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.” “This is good news?” “It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.” “The burning doesn’t go away?” “What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull toward yourself.” “Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?” “LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.” “So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.” “You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

I have no liking for prisons, Master Li. Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while. That this is the way of life, from the All-Highest down to the meanest creature in creation... But whether this is the case or no, it is still a worthy thing to open cages. It is still a virtuous act to free the imprisoned. Tools of course, can be the subtlest of traps. One day, I know, I must smash the emerald.

After lunch they looked through some stuff in the garage and found a long narrow cage suitable for Joann to travel in. It had once served as a humane catch-’em-alive mink trap, and in fact no mink had ever entered it, such was its humanity.

And at last, the wicked Queen's spell was broken, and the young woman, whom circumstance and cruelty had trapped in the body of a bird, was released from her cage. The cage door opened and the cuckoo bird fell, fell, fell, until finally her stunted wings opened, and she found that she could fly. With the cool sea breeze of her homeland buffeting the underside of her wings, she soared over the cliff edge and across the ocean. Towards a new land of hope, and freedom, and life. Towards her other half. Home.

River doesn’t let me finish my sentence as he gently pushes me back against the rail. His arms are extended on either side of me, he’s surrounding me, caging me in, but once again, I don’t feel trapped. He never moves his lips away from my neck as he repositions us. My breath is hitched and my heartbeat has doubled as I tilt my head back to allow him full access to my neck. He’s softly running a trail of kisses from my neck up to my mouth, slowly, lightly licking, softly sucking, until his lips finally meet mine.

Invading a statist society is like grabbing the cages of a large number of trapped chickens – you get all of the eggs in perpetuity. Invading a stateless society is like taking a sprint at a flock of seagulls – all they do is scatter, and you get nothing, except perhaps some crap on your forehead.

TV irony changed in post-modern times. Irony, which exploits the difference between what is said and what is meant, and between how things appear and how they really are, used to be a reliable trope for exposing hypocrisy. Post-modern irony is not liberating, but rather imprisoning. Wallace quoted the poet and philosopher Lewis Hyde: ‘Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

I had a theory for a while, but I had to let it go. It was wasting away in captivity. It sat there in the cage of my brain and wouldn't eat. When I had first trapped it it was beautiful and wild and amused everyone. "Too much attention," the vet said. It wasn't cut out for that kind of life. "Smart

I don’t know how much time passes or if it passes at all before I strong arms surround me. They feel big and cage-like, but instead of trapping me, they’re holding me up. And then his voice, one made of a strange mix of nightmares and lullabies, rings in my ear. “What the fuck am I going to do with you?

It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical

Growing old is to be set free, Brother. It is aslow and long-simmering process that extracts from you what you are really made of. But it requires acceptance. You cannot put a flailing chicken in a boiling pot. You must accept the heat and the pain with serenity so that the full flavors of your life may be released. You may see this as decay, and it is. But it is also much more than that. As the body rots, so does the cage that traps us in our worldly concerns. When my legs became too weak to carry my body, I stopped pacing with worry. When my fingers became twisted, I stopped pointing blame. When I lost my sight, I stopped seeing illusions. It may be dark in the pot that I am simmering in, but I can see more clearly than I have ever seen in my life. I can see you, Brother, and I know who you are.

Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. That is what we are doing with this tale. We are listening to its ancient message. We are learning about deteriorative patterns so we can go on with the strength of one who can sense the traps and cages and baits before we are upon them or caught in them.

What you need is not to be free. Cages are in the mind. It’s a state of being and you’re trapped there. Held in place by fear and fighting what you think will destroy you

These cages, which in their naked state are indistinguishable from something you trap wild dogs in, have a sensible use. Without one, you won't be able to walk.

Set your peace free before your caged mind catches you again in another dream trap where you may loathe to be your own menace awaiting in hope of a war-less world !

pedestal is nothing more than an elegant cage. No walls, no locks, but unless one has wings to fly away, one is trapped. A pedestal is the most insidious prison ever devised.

Except being kept is the thing that's slowly choking the life out of me. No matter how nice the cage, the bird inside is still trapped.

Purchase open-cage light fixtures whenever possible. Their lack of glass makes them less likely to break, less likely to trap dead bugs, and makes it easier to replace light bulbs.

A soul trapped in the cage of doctrines cannot fly.

I’m a bird trapped in a self-made cage

God, I’m trapped in a Southern gothic novel.” “You asked for it.” She finishes off her martini in a gulp. “I hope nobody’s going to ask me to squeal like a pig.

Because marriage is supposed to make you happy, not make you feel like a rat trapped in a very glamorous cage with twenty-thousand dollar silk draperies.

When love drains your spirit instead of lifting it, it’s not love, it’s a cage that keeps you trapped.

The course she was on was as fixed and unalterable as the trajectory of a bullet, but you could see she did not believe that. No one in the life ever believed it. They saw a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people precede them into the trap, saw how unvarying and pitiless the end was, and with all that fresh in their minds they did the same, of their own free will.

They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us. They tore us apart with hounds. They baited steel-jawed traps. They starved us out. They burned us alive. They withheld water. They killed all our prey. They slit our throats. They filled in our burrows. They drowned us. They trampled us under horses’ hooves. They bred us for fur and bludgeoned us to death. They kept us in cages so small with so many we burst apart. They suffocated us with poison gas. They strangled us. They put us in sacks and beat us with clubs. They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive. They detonated rock and stopped our hearts all unknowing. They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones. They murdered us in each and every year. They murdered us on each and every day.

I caught a red bird once, I fell in love with her, Took the red bird home with me, I saw her eyes, at saw my peace, I love the red bird much, I cut her wings, I wanted the bird to stay, I made a cage for her, No wings, and trapped, the red bird cried, I saw her eyes in pain; it broke my heart to see, I was the one to blame, for the red bird’s pain, It grew back its wings, no longer in the cage, She looked at me once more, spread its wings and left, I loved that red bird still; I wish she was with me But now I know for sure , her pain was caused by me.

We were trapped, we were completely caged Some of my mother’s good friends were raped This is what went on while war and genocide raged Our dignity, identity, and layers of skin were scraped

My room became a cell, which became a cage, which became a coffin, and I discovered the very deepest fear that swam through my heart like eels in undersea caves: to be locked away, trapped and alone.

I am strong and on the road to recovery away from the place that caused so much pain. I am free. I am a bird whose broken wing is now mended and I am able to escape the steel cage I was once trapped in.

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I’d rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini’s water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity.

I am caged in by him. He’s everywhere, his scent, his touch, but I don’t feel trapped at all. It’s all I can do to stop myself from moaning his name and begging him to take me right here on the kitchen counter.

Are you trying to live a safe life? The word safe is both an adjective and a noun. As an adjective it means “being free from danger.” As a noun it’s “an enclosed storage container with a lock.” If you’re living the adjective, you’re living the noun. Don’t trap yourself in a cage of false security by trying to avoid rejection. In the long run, building your courage is a smarter choice than running from imaginary dangers.

but Cam has come to understand that a pedestal is nothing more than an elegant cage. No walls, no locks, but unless one has wings to fly away, one is trapped. A pedestal is the most insidious prison ever devised.

Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity (or at least of trapping and caging it so it doesn’t move around quite so much), we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor. Every atlas eventually becomes a history book, but a globe is still a glorious thing to feel spinning under your hands with potential.

The rats that were trapped alone in cages opted to get high as much as possible, but the rats with interesting lives (community, space, toys) tried the drugged water once or twice, and then stayed away from it. The rats with lives worth living had little interest in the escapism the drugs offered. Overall, they consumed less than a quarter of the drugged water the isolated rats did. None overdosed or ignored food until they starved.

A story was once so great For this heart he took no name Poisoned by hate and shade Trapped in a melancholy stage Only her can break this cage A spell has only her name Gone with a selfish phase A love only fewer can taste

- I don’t feel free. I feel trapped, suffocated under the piles of baggage I’ve had strapped on my back for so long, it feels like they’ve melded to my very soul. I’d give anything for a moment of peace. To be able to breathe.

Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

I love you. I will always love you. But this kind of love does not demand anything from you, this kind of love is not a cage. If you cannot bring yourself to give your heart to me, then know this: You hold no blame for any of this. I loved you. And I made a dangerous, foolish bargain with your mother, because I was so certain of our destiny, that I could not see the trap around me. Your heart is a gift but if you cannot give it to me, it will never change how I feel about you. You bear no responsibility for any of this.

When I see you, Jolie, I see a woman who is far more than she realizes but who will someday grow into her powers. One who is much stronger than those who would trap her inside their cages or try to put her to harness. One with a bold intelligence, with whom I can laugh. One who surprises me." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was so soft I had to strain to hear. "I see a woman who makes me feel alive again, like a man, and not like a wraith who has lived beyond his usefulness in a world that no longer needs him.

One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed. Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants.

She dances, She dances around the burning flames with passion, Under the same dull stars, Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing, Under the same silver chains that wires, All her beauty and who she is inside, She's left with the loneliness of human existence, She's left questioning how she's survived, She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience, Her true beauty that she denies, As much she's like to deny it, As much as it continues to shine, That she doesn't even have to admit, Because we all know it's true, Her glory and success, After all she's been through, Her triumph and madness, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Broken legs- but she's still standing, Still dancing in this void, You must wonder how she's still dancing, You must wonder how she's not destroyed, She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames, But little do you realize, Within these chains, She weeps and she cries, But she still goes on, And just you thought you could stop her? You thought you'd be the one? Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong. Nothing will ever silence her, Because I KNOW, I know that she is admiringly strong, Her undeniable beauty, The triumph of her song, She's shining bright like a ruby, Reflecting in the golden sand, She's shining brighter like no other, She's far more than human or man, AND YET, SHE STANDS. She continues to dance with free-spirit, Even though she's locked in these chains, Though she never desired to change it, Even throughout the agonizing pain, Throughout all the distress, Anxiety, depression, tears and sorrow, She still dances so beautify in her dress, She looks forward to tomorrow, Not because of a fresh start but a new page, A new day full of opportunities, Despite being trapped in her cage, She still smiles after being beaten so brutally, A smile that could brighten anyone's day, She's so much more than anyone could ask for, She's so much more than I could ever say, She's a girl absolutely everyone should adore, She never gets in the way, Even after her hearts been broken, Even after the way she has been treated, After all these severe emotions, After all all the blood she's bled, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Even if sometimes she wonders why she's still here, She wonders why she's not dead, But there's this one thing that had been here throughout every tear, Throughout the blazing fire leaving her cheeks cherry red, Everyday this thing has given her a place to exist, This thing, person, these people, Like warm sunlight it had so softly kissed, The apples of her cheeks, Even when she's feeling feeble, Always there at her worst and at her best Because of you and all the other people, She has this thing deep inside her chest, That she will cherish forever, Even once you're gone, Because today she smiles like no other, Even when the sun sets at dawn, Because today is the day, She just wants you to remember, In dark and stormy weather, It gets better. And after what she's been through she knows, Throughout the highs and the lows, Because of you and all others, After crossing the seas, She has come to understand, You have formed this key, This key to free her from this land, This endless gorge that swallowed her, Her and other men, She had never knew, nor had she planned, That because of you, She's free. AND YET, THIS VERY DAY, SHE DANCES. EVEN IN THE RAIN.

nothing but a testament of his ownership of me. A daily reminder of the golden cage I’d be trapped in for the rest of my life. Until death do us part wasn’t an empty promise as with so many other couples that entered the holy bond of marriage. There was no way out of this union for me. I was Luca’s until the bitter end. The last few words of the oath that men swore when they were inducted into the mafia could just as well have been the closing of my wedding vow: “I enter alive and I will have to get out dead.” I should have run when I still had the chance.

Know then this journey seeks to define ends, seeks shores where farther oceans start; caged by the over-muscled heart, we are trapped in that bright moment where we learned our doom, but still we struggle, knowing, too, that freedom is imposed the very moment when the trap springs...

If you imagine complex, challenging possibilities, your brain will adapt to them. Much like a tiger trapped in a zoo exhibits repetitive displacement behavior, if you cage your imagination within the bars of the dull and neurotic, which often portray one’s fears more than they do an empirical “truth,” then your brain will adapt to these imagined meanings, too. Like the sad tiger pacing back and forth within its puny cage, your brain too will ruminate cyclically upon destructive meanings, and in doing so make them more significant than they might need to be. This present perceptual meaning becomes part of your future history of meanings, together with the meaning (and re-meanings) of past events, thus shaping your future perception. If you don’t want to let received contexts limit possibility, then you need to walk in the darkest forest of all—the one in your own skull—and face down the fear of ideas that challenge.

Absorbing the rest of her shadow into his, he knuckled the wall on either side of her head, trapping her in the cage of his arms, but not touching. The cool, sweaty bricks ground into his skin. She shivered and flattened her hands as if clinging to the wall for protection. Fire flared low in his gut, spurring him on.

I started to leave, but Wölfe trapped me in his arms and buried his face in my neck. “I’ll come before the night is over.” The words rumbled in his chest, and I felt them to the tips of my toes. Kalyll. Wölfe. Wölfe. Kalyll. My emotions flared for both of them. How could I feel this way about two completely different males?

He joined because he was trapped like a caged animal. He joined because a man who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning, climbs a mountain in rain or fog or killing heat, and sweats all day with mosquitoes in his mouth does not need an empire telling him how to live, which flag to wave, what language to speak, and what heroes to worship.

you must keep following in love knowing that it will destroy you if you believe that this-romantic love, infatuation, obsession-will set you free you will forever be trapped in cages you put yourself in let it hurt and bleed and grow and know that it is not meant to be everything you want, yet, it is everything it is everything.

With a glance back towards the house, he pulled the secret sketches from within. He'd been working at them on and off for a fortnight now, ever since he'd come across Cousin Eliza's fairy tales among Rose's things. Though they were written for children, magical stories of bravery and morality, they had made their way beneath his skin. The characters had seeped inside his mind and come alive, their simple wisdom a balm for his swirling mind, his ugly adult troubles. He had found himself in moments of distraction scribbling lines that had turned themselves into a crone at a spinning wheel, the Fairy Queen with her long thick plait, the Princess bird trapped in her golden cage.

Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and time again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all.

But then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to

What she’s going after is exactly why she became an astronomer in the first place, and why I have always impressed upon you and every other one of my students the importance of lifting one’s chin. It’s about experiencing awe, Carver. When you can put yourself in a state of awe, you see things for what they truly are. We’re lifted out of the fragile cage in which our tiny minds are often trapped.

Religion and caste have always condemned us to a lifetime of fear. In a customary moment of love we may sing a note or two about taking wing like birds, but the truth is we continue to be trapped in the cage of religion and caste. The way things are in India, couples invariably find little love and far more hatred in the course of their love. That they still dare to love is worthy of our salutations.

One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself, clutching the little wooden bird. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, to Jean and Marthe, in a stone house just beyond the old yew tree … She tells the story of her life to the little carving, as if afraid she’ll forget herself as easily as others do, unaware that her mind is now a flawless cage, her memory a perfect trap. She will never forget, though she’ll wish she could.

structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

Even to my mother, her hard-won autonomy must at times have resembled a cage. Still, it was a cage of her own design, different from and superior to the one my father, and her parents, and Gloversville itself, would have put her in, if she'd allowed them to. In retrospect, what astonishes me is the courage she must have summoned in order to imagine, by working in Schenectady, by having her own checking account, by going out on the occasional date, that she was outside the cage she was so clearly trapped in.

The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage. Fortunately,

He is the butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come my clothes. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air - all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. He could thrust me into the seed-bed of next year's generation and I would have to wait until he whistled me up from my darkness before I could come back again. His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears bloom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely. I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. You sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

Unforgiveness feels like a prison built by the hands of a criminal where we end up incarcerated. Whether robbed, violated, or betrayed, we find ourselves trapped by the bondage of bitterness, the chains of cynicism, and the shackles of sin. With enough time, we can convince ourselves the prisons of our past were built by someone else, but unforgiveness is a cage we construct ourselves. If we choose to stop focusing on our inward pain and instead scan the perimeter, we discover the door to freedom hangs wide open thanks to Christ. The choice is ours.

We’ve created mass production at low prices, a system that operates under duress. There are stressed-out pigs who can’t mate, who bite one another’s tails because they’re so confined, or who are so heavy their legs can no longer support their bodies; turkeys who can’t reproduce naturally; chickens who have to be debeaked because they peck at each other in densely packed cages; roosters bred for growth who’ve become so aggressive that they injure or kill their mates; and cows who eat other cows as part of their feed and go mad. All of this is presided over by stressed-out farmers, many of whom have come to accept the industry’s bigger-is-better mantra, though it’s clearly unsustainable for them and the earth. In the process they have become almost as trapped as the animals they “farm.” Farmers, industry, and consumers have created a treadmill that runs ever more rapidly, fueled by all kinds of suffering animals—including us. It’s a system that only takes and doesn’t give back; it extracts and doesn’t replenish, until the creatures and the earth that sustain its existence have nothing more to give.

But the same night will continue on. Today is just yesterday, continued. Tomorrow is just today, continued. Day breaks, night falls, day breaks. Night probably falls again. The little details differ, sure. But for the most part, everything is pretty much the same, and I feel neither more nor less sluggish today than I did last Thursday. I am sluggish. But still compelled to dance. Provided there’s some variety to the music. I’m trapped inside an invisible cage, you see. I can’t leave it. I feel so hollow and futile it makes me sick. It’s easy, though.

Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as st7-uctunal racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage" metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11

It nearly killed me. It trapped me like a bird in a cage.' Elain said, 'Then I will find it. I might require some time to reacquaint myself with my powers, but I could start today.' 'Absolutely not,' Nesta spat, fingers curling at her sides. 'Absolutely not.' 'Why?' Elain demanded. 'Shall I tend to my little garden forever?' When Nesta flinched, Elain said, 'You can't have it both ways. You cannot resent my decision to lead a small, quiet life while also refusing to let me do anything greater.' 'Then go off on adventures,' Nesta said. 'Go drink and fuck strangers. But stay away from the Cauldron.

What are you? Who are you? I have never met a Chosen like you in my entire existence. You are everything that is free. You are freedom. And I... I'm the bird trapped in the cage, watching you fly away. But then, you look back at me, you always look back, and you reach through the bars and offer your hand to me. Though I am nothing, though I am just a heartless creature, you still offer me your hand. But I won't take it. I won't because... what will happen to us if I do? It doesn't matter. None of it matters. Because you were kind to me, you made me laugh - that isn't something I will forget easily, and I will repay you.

If the caged bird is the Beast, trapped and taunted by the idea of freedom, then like it, the Black fat sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still; we sit on graves of dreams not yet seen. In those dreams, which may never resurrect, there's a place--not the World--where we live and breathe as beings not bound by identifiers and qualifiers predicated on anti-Blackness. Where we are not Black or white, not thin or fat, not cis or trans, not queer or straight, not bound or unbound. In that place, the caged bird is not freed from its cage; in that place, the cage never existed for the bird to ever be bound by.

Excessive submission to social authority is one of the biggest killers of innovation. Things that carry social authority can only ever be things that already exist as being popular and accepted. A good way to side-step the hypnotic cage that social authority traps us in is to explore areas that are not considered to be prestigious or valid. The most innovative of the popular musicians are always influenced partly by music genres that are unpopular. By finding the best aspects of those less popular genres and bringing them into play with the qualities of a more popular style of music, they are able to create a fresh sound that a mainstream audience is ready for.

The world is a cage built by the hands of gods and men and woven from the threads of time and space. It hangs upon the back of a great beast which wanders through the void driven by fear. From the thread of life it hangs, a prison for the mind, a trap for the spirit, a snare for the heart. Within this cage, all things are bound: the sun and moon, the stars and seas, the beasts of field and forest, and the children of earth, for it is a prison for the souls of men. The bars are forged of necessity and desire, woven together by the threads of fate. They are as strong as mountains and as delicate as spider’s webs. For we reach out for what we want, and in doing so, we bind our souls to the world.

This is a story about a tiger named Mohini that was in captivity in a zoo, who was rescued from an animal sanctuary. Mohini had been confined to a 10-by-10-foot cage with a concrete floor for 5 or 10 years. They finally released her into this big pasture: With excitement and anticipation, they released Mohini into her new and expensive environment, but it was too late. The tiger immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound, where she lived for the remainder of her life. She paced and paced in that corner until an area 10-by-10 feet was worn bare of grass. . . . Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”).

We’ve only just found each other! You cannot condemn me to live without you! Would you really go so soon, and leave me? Never to return, or if you did, only after an agony of waiting you should wish on no man! And how should I greet thee, after long years? With silence, and tears! My heart will break, yet brokenly live on!” “Stop quoting yourself!” Emily snapped. “You were! You were going to trap me here in Glass Town all for yourself! You’d steal my father and my aunt and my home away! You would make this whole beautiful world into a cage to hold me fast.” “No, Ellis—Emily! I would love you! I would be your husband!” “I’m ten!” “So?” shouted Lord Byron desperately. “I’m eleven! Emily, my darling, don’t be so dramatic.

But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again. Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother's guarded tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be cured.

She feels nothing.” Tristan’s brow furrowed. “A bit harsh, isn’t it?” Libby Rhodes was an anxious impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she had allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them except for Nico, and of course she was. Because that was her curse: regardless of how much power she possessed, she lacked the dauntlessness to misuse it. She was too small-minded, too unhungry for that. Too trapped within the cage of her own fears, her desires to be liked. The day she woke up and realized she could make her own world would be a dangerous one, but it was so unlikely it hardly kept Callum up at night. “It is for her own safety that she feels nothing,” Callum said. “It is something she does to survive.

She dances, She dances around the burning flames with passion, Under the same dull stars, Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing, Under the same silver chains that wires, All her beauty and who she is inside, She's left with the loneliness of human existence, She's left questioning how she's survived, She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience, Her true beauty that she denies, As much she's like to deny it, As much as it continues to shine, That she doesn't even have to admit, Because we all know it's true, Her glory and success, After all she's been through, Her triumph and madness, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Broken legs- but she's still standing, Still dancing in this void, You must wonder how she's still dancing, You must wonder how she's not destroyed, She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames, But little do you realize, Within these chains, She weeps and she cries, But she still goes on, And just you thought you could stop her? You thought you'd be the one? Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong. Nothing will ever silence her, Because I KNOW, I know that she is admiringly strong, Her undeniable beauty, The triumph of her song, She's shining bright like a ruby, Reflecting in the golden sand, She's shining brighter like no other, She's far more than human or man, AND YET, SHE STANDS. She continues to dance with free-spirit, Even though she's locked in these chains, Though she never desired to change it, Even throughout the agonizing pain, Throughout all the distress, Anxiety, depression, tears and sorrow, She still dances so beautify in her dress, She looks forward to tomorrow, Not because of a fresh start but a new page, A new day full of opportunities, Despite being trapped in her cage, She still smiles after being beaten so brutally, A smile that could brighten anyone's day, She's so much more than anyone could ask for, She's so much more than I could ever say, She's a girl absolutely everyone should adore, She never gets in the way, Even after her hearts been broken, Even after the way she has been treated, After all these severe emotions, After all all the blood she's bled, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Even if sometimes she wonders why she's still here, She wonders why she's not dead, But there's this one thing that had been here throughout every tear, Throughout the blazing fire leaving her cheeks cherry red, Everyday this thing has given her a place to exist, This thing, person, these people, Like warm sunlight it had so softly kissed, The apples of her cheeks, Even when she's feeling feeble, Always there at her worst and at her best Because of you and all the other people, She has this thing deep inside her chest, That she will cherish forever, Even once you're gone, Because today she smiles like no other, Even when the sun sets at dawn, Because today is the day, She just wants you to remember, In dark and stormy weather, It gets better. And after what she's been through she knows, Throughout the highs and the lows, Because of you and all others, After crossing the seas, She has come to understand, You have formed this key, This key to free her from this land, This endless gorge that swallowed her, Her and other men, She had never knew, nor had she planned, That because of you, She's free. AND YET, THIS VERY DAY, SHE STILL DANCES, EVEN IN THE RAIN.

Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

NO, WE DO NOT HAVE PENS! Bring your own. You'll need them. You see, like every other department in the city, Records runs on Almighty Forms. There are forms that tell the Night Mayor's office what we hunters are doing - starting an investigation, ending one, or reaching various points along the way. There are forms that make things happen, from installing rat traps to getting lab work done. There are forms with which to requisition peep-hunting equipment, from tiger cages to Tasers. (The form for commandeering a genuine NYC garbage truck may be thirty-four pages long, but one day I will think of some reason to fill it out, I swear to you.) There are even forms that activate other forms or switch them off, that cause other forms to mutate, thus bringing newly formed forms into the world. Put together, all these forms are the vast spiral of information that defines us, guides our growth, and makes sure our future looks like our past - they are the DNA of the Night Watch.

When she tricked me out of my powers and left the scraps, it was still more than the others. And I decided to use it to tap into the minds of every Night Court citizen she'd captured, and anyone who might know the truth. I made a web between all of them, actively controlling their minds every second of every day, every decade, to forget about Velaris, to forget about Mor, and Amren, and Cassian, and Azriel. Amarantha wanted to know who was close to me- who to kill and torture. But my true court was here, ruling this city and the others. And I used the remainder of my powers to shield them all from sight and sound. I had only enough for one city, one place. I chose the one that had been hidden from history already. I chose, and now must live with the consequences of knowing there were more left outside who suffered. But for those here.... anyone flying or travelling near Velaris would see nothing but barren rock, and if they tried to walk through it, they'd find themselves suddenly deciding otherwise. Sea travel and merchant trading were halted- sailors became farmers, working the earth around Velaris instead. And because my powers were focused on shielding them all, Feyre, I had very little to use against Amarantha. So I decided that to keep her from asking questions about the people who mattered, I would be her whore.' He'd done all of that, had done such horrible things... done everything for his people, his friends. And the only piece of himself that he'd hidden and managed to keep her from tainting, destroying, even if it meant fifty years trapped in a cage of rock....'' Those wings now flared wide. How many knew about those wings outside of Velaris or the Illyrian war-camps? Or had he wiped all memory of them from Prythian long before Amarantha? Rhys released my chin. But as he lowered his hand, i gripped his wrist, feeling the solid strength. 'It's a shame,' I said, the words nearly gobbled up by the sound of the city music. 'That others in Prythian don't know. A shame that you let them think the worst.' He took a step back, his wings beating the air like mighty drums. 'As long as the people who matter most know the truth, I don't care about the rest. Get some sleep.' Then he shot into the sky, and was swallowed by the darkness between the stars.

You’ve got spirit, I’ll give you that,” Ezmia said. “Perhaps this will humble you.” Ezmia placed the glass jar she had been carrying on a small table close to Charlotte’s cage. Charlotte was horrifed to see a miniature ghostly version of the Fairy Godmother trapped inside. “That’s my… my… grandmother!” Charlotte said, almost forgetting she was still pretending to be her own daughter. “What have you done to her?” A smile appeared on Ezmia’s face, matching the satisfaction in her eyes. “I captured her soul,” she said. The thought almost made Charlotte sick. She’d had no idea such a thing was possible, even in the fairy-tale world. “What do you want with her soul?” Charlotte asked. “It’s a bit of a hobby of mine, actually,” Ezmia said and walked to her fireplace. Displayed proudly on the mantel were five other turquoise jars, each containing a ghostly substance. “You’re a soul collector?” Charlotte asked. “Is it to make up for being soulless?” “What a clever play on words,” Ezmia said mockingly. “You know that phrase forgive and forget? Well, I always disagreed with it—I found it impossible, actually. People would do me wrong and then forget about me, as if their actions didn’t matter—because I didn’t matter. How was I supposed to forgive people like that?” “So you imprisoned their souls instead of forgiving?” Charlotte said. “Precisely,” Ezmia said. “I found taking away their life force to be much more appealing than simply forgiving. To forgive would be to allow them to continue living their lives, free of consequence. But by taking their souls and preventing them from all future happiness, I could heal and find peace.” Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Do you honestly expect anyone to sympathize with that?” Charlotte asked her. Ezmia stared into the fire at the burning skulls, almost in a trance. “I don’t want the world to understand; I want it to grovel,” she said. The confession made Charlotte’s heart heavier. She wondered if she would ever escape the clutches of a person who thought like this. But thinking about her children, Bob, and the life she had been stolen from gave Charlotte the strength to survive the Enchantress’s imprisonment. “I find it hard to believe that the Fairy Godmother, who is known for her generosity, would harm you in any way,” Charlotte said. “Sometimes help can be just as destructive as harm,” Ezmia said. “But I imagine someone who helps for a

KOPI LUWAK In Indonesia, Kopi Luwak refers to coffees that are produced by collecting the droppings of civet cats that have eaten coffee cherries. This semi-digested coffee is separated from the faecal matter and then processed and dried. In the last decade it has come to be seen as an amusing novelty, with unattributed claims of its excellent flavours, and it sells for spectacularly high prices. This has caused two main problems. Firstly, the forgery of this coffee is quite commonplace. Several times more is sold than produced, and often low-grade Robusta is being passed off at high prices. Secondly, it has encouraged unscrupulous operators on the islands to trap and cage civet cats, force-feed them with coffee cherries and keep them in terrible conditions. I find Kopi Luwak abhorrent on just about every level. If you are interested in delicious coffee then it is a terrible waste of money. One-quarter of the money you might spend on a bag could instead buy you a stunning coffee from one of the very best producers in the world. I can only regard the practice as abusive and unethical and I believe people should avoid all animal-processed coffees, and not reward this despicable behaviour with their money.

The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.

What it like to sail?" she asked. His gaze shifted, and he stared into the distance. "It's freedom. Like riding a powerful horse with a gait like silk. You speed over the waves, carried on the wind, held up over an unknowable depth of water beneath you, with the entire sky above. And that sky is a different color depending on where on earth you are. There are a thousand shades of blue. You can look up and know where you are, just by the color. And the stars at night - there's indescribable beauty in the stars, like a woman's eyes, flashing, shining... And yet, they are tools, enabling navigation, a map to follow..." She stared at his profile as he spoke, at the scars that marred his brow and cheeks, the crooked line of his broken nose, the elegant, aristocratic line of his jaw, half-hidden under the shadow of stubble, and the soft, sensual curve of his mouth. She saw the sea in his eyes, smelled the wind, tasted the salt, and she felt her chest tighten with a longing to sail, to experience speed and adventure. Breathless, she felt the presence of the man in the portrait, the rogue, the bold captain. Her heart twisted as she imagined him in prison, beaten, chained, tormented to madness. He was still a prisoner, trapped inside the cage of his injured flesh, his damaged bones, his memories of unspeakable horrors. What would it take to set him free?

Broadway lit up just as crazy as ever, and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a good reason, and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes, or fancy shirts. The new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every other joint a food emporium. Everytime I hit that runway toward dinner hour, a fever of expectancy seized me. It's only a stretch of a few blocks from Time Square to 50th street, and when one says 'Broadway', that's all that's really meant. And it's really nothing, just a chicken run, and a lousy one at that. But at 7 in the evening, when everybody's rushing for a table, there is a sort of electrical crackle in the air. And your hair stands on end like antennae, and if you're receptive, you not only get every flash and flicker, but you get the statistical itch. The quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which compose the Milky Way. Only, this is the gay white way. The top of the world with no roof above and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it's a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium, which makes you run forward like a blind nag, and wag your delirious ears. Everyone is so utterly, confoundedly not himself, that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race. Shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up until Moses, and beyond that, you are a woman buying a bird cage, or just a mouse trap.

I looked at one of the tigers Lady Hamilton-Jones had imported from India, pacing up and down inside its gilded cage. It felt like the perfect metaphor for the party, all of us trapped inside a glittering prison that shone so bright, most of us were too dazzled to see the bars. This was the column I burned to write, but I knew Harry would have my guts for garters if I filed it

I felt hopeless for a moment, as if I were trapped in a cage, simply pacing around and around in circles, the illusion of movement disguising the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere.

He’s not a pet. That’s why his cage is glass, the kind of glass where we can see him but he can’t see us. We’re just taking care of him until his leg is better, and then he’ll go back to the park. He can’t get used to people feeding him or petting him or dogs playing with him, or he won’t be safe in the wild, see? My dad rescued him. He’s a game warden. He found Sammy caught in an illegal trap, and he even arrested the men who put the trap out!” The animal was moving in such a tantalizing manner—quick little hops, its head making sudden jerky motions. I knew it must want to play Chase Me! I peered up at Maggie Rose and whined a little.

Strong gusts of wind blew straight back against her, as if in warning. Its strength coaxed tears from her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and kept on. She’d not come this far to run right back to the husband who wanted her trapped. At least not for a few days—long enough for him see his errors. This would show him how well she could handle herself, and how wrong he was in his attempts to cage her. After this he’d know without a doubt she wouldn’t live under his thumb, no matter how hard he tried to get her there. She

Do you remember the words I shared from Maria Mitchell, the first female astronomer?” She perked up, her voice finding sure ground. “Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” “Ah, I suppose I do remember that quote.” “What she’s going after is exactly why she became an astronomer in the first place, and why I have always impressed upon you and every other one of my students the importance of lifting one’s chin. It’s about experiencing awe, Carver. When you can put yourself in a state of awe, you see things for what they truly are. We’re lifted out of the fragile cage in which our tiny minds are often trapped.

When you can put yourself in a state of awe, you see things for what they truly are. We’re lifted out of the fragile cage in which our tiny minds are often trapped.

He was a man, and a knight. Even if they were both trapped by duty, her cage was bound to be tighter, crueler, and more dangerous than his.

am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want.

Living in occupied Kraków, I felt like a pet bird, able to fly just the tiniest bit, but always mindful of being trapped in a cage.

I can’t be a songbird trapped in its cage forever.

I wasn’t going to fall into that little mind trap. In Darkmore, everyone’s business was their own. So if she wanted her to dance naked with nipple tassels on to the tune of Baby Shark then that was her concern. Not mine.

In a voice both low and curious, he said, “You’re not what I expected.” “No,” she whispered. “I suppose I’m not.” Time seemed to slow and stretch. He observed her with intensity, as if she were a songbird he had trapped and would cage forever.

We "overvalue performance," as one psychologist put it, "and undervalue the self." We're afraid of being just okay at things. This is a trap. "For to permit yourself to do only that which you're good at," writes the legal scholar Tim Wu, "is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.

Apart from loss, what we really fear in death is not death itself but the gloomy thought of being bound up forever and ever in the dark. If it is true that we cease to exist upon death—who can say for sure?—then death is not something to be experienced. Dying perhaps, but not death itself. It is as though the entire world doesn’t exist and never has. Death would be precisely the same kind of experience as we had before our earliest memory. An unfathomable void beyond experience. So instead, when we recoil at the thought of death, when we really think it through this is really a fear of being trapped. And our animal instincts cannot stand for that. We recoil at being stuck in a cage and so naturally we react. Our heart races and we immediately seek escape

I’d thought myself free because I didn’t have a physical cage when in fact I’d been trapped by my own mind,

If you want to assign dubious motives to anyone, you should start with the Creator who set this game in motion in the first place, who trapped your strange little wandering souls in flesh-cages and then demanded you look away

Yet there it is, a sort of anxious shock fluttering behind my ribs like a bird trapped in a cage.

So they went at it again, driven only by the aching loneliness of their existence, two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers, living in an insane asylum, the insanity of it seeming to live on itself and charge them,

Ownership would be the ultimate loss. It doesn’t matter if he brings my body pleasure, not if my mind’s trapped in a cage.

There’s a fine line between begging your husband for sex and unleashing the sexual beast from his cage to the point where you’re so sore you can barely sit down. Who knew all it took to cross that line would be surprising Liam naked in bed?

trapped inside the cage

Really all I did was build myself a cage. And then I trapped myself inside that cage and told myself the bars weren’t real.

All my life, people had coddled me. Josh. My friends. Alex. Or at least he’d pretended to care about me. I’d let them, because it was easier to lean on others than myself. I’d thought myself free because I didn’t have a physical cage when in fact I’d been trapped by my own mind, by the fears that haunted my days and the nightmares that haunted my nights. I stuck with the safe choices because I thought I wasn’t strong enough for anything else.

I think somebody white is burning those houses to start up a second civil war down here. And what I’ve come here today to beg you not to do—is fall into their trap. It’s an old trap, brothers and sisters! They want to stir you up and make you do something they can use to prove to the world you’re everything they claim you are. They want to make you loot a store, or flip a police car, set a convenience store on fire. They want to point at you and say, ‘Look at those animals! They’ve got no respect for property. They don’t value human life the way we do.’ Folks, I know you’re too smart to let yourselves be used like that.

People often get trapped in the cages that others put them into, and this just creates resentment over time. There may be conflict about what you need to let go of, but it is a discomfort you must face for your purpose to unfold into fulfillment and meaning.

The real predator is already inside the cage, and I’m trapped right between his teeth.

Trapped. She was trapped. She was locked up. In a cage. Again. She was helpless as she watched them.

Why did you kiss me?” His smile drops, but the intimacy in his stare only brightens. He hovers over me, planting his hands on either side of my head and caging me in. This… this is the only cage I want to be in. “There’s a place in the ocean, so deep, where not a single point of light penetrates through it. And for so long, I’ve been trapped there, unable to breathe. When I met you, you lifted me out of that darkness, and it was the first time I came up for air. You’ve become my oxygen, bella ladra, and I can no longer breathe without you.

Some burdens don't come to make you a Sisyphus. They come to show you the path to freedom.

Both of us are trapped in a rut of being the same person.The coward who hides from the fight.The boy who runs from monsters.Even when we should change,when we have the power to change,we're still stuck in the past.

Me getting married? Pfft. Not in this lifetime. I can’t imagine settling down with one person forever. The thought alone makes me feel suffocated, like I’m trapped in a cage with no way out. I’ve seen too many marriages fall apart, too many people end up miserable and resentful. I refuse to let that happen to me. But as I glance over at Audrey, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to wake up next to her every morning, to have her by my side through all of life’s ups and downs. The thought is both terrifying and exhilarating, and I quickly push it away.

Her mind was like a heinous beast trapped inside a cage, waiting for the moment to burst out and wreak havoc on everything she loved.

Backing out the way I went under, my bare ass bumps into his legs. “You thought you were done?” Turning beneath the desk, I realize he’s trapping me beneath it with his body. “I told you, Briony. This is your baptism,” he says with a controlled voice, opening the belt to his slacks. “It’s time we took away your purity.” My heart flutters in the confines of its cage as Aero removes his belt from the loops of his pants. “Isn’t this what you want?” he asks, leaning down to where I’m sitting on my calves. Holding his belt with both of his hands about two feet apart, he drapes it around the back of my neck, and I shudder. “To be dirtied by the devil?” Yanking the belt towards him, my head tilts further, looking up at the masked man above me. Something about his belt behind my neck has my body warming with that same lustful wonder I can’t contain, the tightening of my lower abdomen making me want to touch the space between my legs for some sort of relief. “Yes,” I whisper, then close my eyes tightly, hating everything about how I’m feeling in his presence.