Quotations and Literature Forum

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
-- Edward R. Murrow

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much love, light and laughter,
ananya.

_________________
~*Blowing out someone else's candle doesn't make your's burn any brighter.*~

I think that could be debated, but I suppose it is mostly true.

A bird entangled in the grass cannot fly. It must first be freed from its entanglement. In like manner we must be loosed from our entanglement to have freedom of life. Our entanglements are often of our own making. We build our own prisons; we shut ourselves up in our own cells. Circumstances can never long imprison us if our spirits are free. Has not someone written, "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage"?
~C. W. Naylor, 1930
http://www.churchofgodcarmichael.org/se ... ging2.html

Day of Liberation
(Bergen-Belsen, May 1945)
We build our own prison walls,
but that day the doors fell open.
It was holiday time
In the death camp.
~Phillip Whitfield
http://www.martinblyth.co.uk/PhillipWhitfield.htm

We build our own prisons. The prisons we live in our products of our own choices. Many people live in prisons of bad health because we smoke, eat fried food and do not exercise. Good news if we built the prison we can tear the prison down.
http://www.dreamhigh.com/prog-1.htm

The prison motif struck me as allegorical to what an artist goes through during the creative process in that we are imprisoned by the limits of our abilities, our concepts, our materials and techniques. But this is not necessarily stifling to creativity. The walls keep coming in, but they are walls of our own making. Artistic creativity isn't about freedom as much as it is about how much you can accomplish in a prison. "We all build our own prisons" - Leland Bell
http://www.lewisgallery.com/CLewis%C4/O ... sroom.html

' . . . we've explored the human imagination. Our minds give us the power to create and destroy. And the power to build our own walls of loneliness."
-William Shatner in 'Dagger of the Mind'

“I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of a dismal prison in which men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.”
~Antoine de Saint Exupery
http://www.trailjournals.com/journals2. ... umber=2629

"We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story."
~ (Maxine Kumin

"Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds."
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth. It is a great art to saunter.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Monday, April 26, 1841
http://www.wisdomportal.com/Emerson-Tho ... oreau.html

My Bird of Paradise, so playful she sings,
As I light the match to begin the burn,
My addictions are a queue that wait in the wings
I see them watching me, just waiting their turn.
My mind now sees through eyes that flutter,
Begging the darkness, please come very soon,
As the last light shines through the open shutter,
Nodding into a bright beam of full moon.
The slowness of time creeps like a slug,
Thought is an exercise, I rest from that one,
Mattress beneath me, a grave I have dug,
Four walls around, they are my prison.
The promise I had at the time I was born,
Lost on the smiles of the ones who were there,
Seeing me now, their hearts would be torn,
To see such a one who no longer can care.
The evil of sadness that penetrates this heart
Has cut all the cords of love, open wound,
Caught now in a world that is no longer a part
Of yours; like trash in the bin of doom.
They say that as long as there is life there is hope,
But how many chances, and how many tries
Do I get as I slide down the downward slope
Toward the open arms of my Bird of Paradise?
~ by me

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko

All the world's a cage.
-Jeanne Phillips

"Why does the caged bird sing?"
-Maya Angelou