Confinement Quotes

“Schizophrenic pandemic aggression may keep us in the confinement of our physical arrest. Still, if we have no other tools in our shed, we have to grind our teeth, take a deep breath, sharpen our awareness, and use the time to recognize what is essential in life. ("Corporeal prison").”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.”
― David Sedaris

“...bars can't build better men and misery can only break what goodness remains.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch Book

“Sister, why do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Cage the animals at night?"
"Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them."

"But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?"

"Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.”
― Jennings Michael Burch, They Cage the Animals at Night: The True Story of an Abandoned Child's Struggle for Emotional Survival

“I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.”
― Hark Herald Sarmiento

“People may be constrained in two basic ways: physically, by confining them in jails, mental hospitals, and so forth; and symbolically, by confining them in occupations, social roles, and so forth. Actually, confinement of the second type is more common and pervasive in the day-to-day conduct of society’s business; as a rule, only when the symbolic, or socially informal, confinement of conduct fails or proves inadequate, is recourse taken to physical, or socially formal, confinement…. When people perform their social roles properly – in other words, when social expectations are adequately met – their behavior is considered normal. Though obvious, this deserves emphasis: a waiter must wait on tables; a secretary must type; a father must earn a living; a mother must cook and sew and take care of her children. Classic systems of psychiatric nosology had nothing to say about these people, so long as they remained neatly imprisoned in their respective social cells; or, as we say about the Negroes, so long as they “knew their place.” But when such persons broke out of “jail” and asserted their liberty, they became of interest to the psychiatrist.”
― Thomas Szasz, Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man

“They saw how the wall around Eden stretched away on either hand, with only the one opening, as though to guard those within from hungry hordes who might wish to come inside. And next to the cherubim they saw the flaming sword. … The flaming sword turned this way, to prevent any intruder entering from the east, and that way, to prevent any intruder entering from the west. But it did not ever turn in the direction of the garden. The mouse and the beetle stood together watching it for a long time. Beyond it the country stretched away, with winding rivers and low hills and stands of trees and no moving thing in sight. The beetle said, ‘These are formidable defences. No one can enter Eden. But I do not see that there is anything to prevent us leaving.”
― Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground

“Many types of treatment claim to be about fixing the so-called problems of madness. The real problem is that certain ways of experiencing the world are seen as categorical threats— to normativity, to capitalism, to hierarchy, to the system itself. And our society's answer to a perceived threat is, of course, confinement.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”
― Foucault Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“In the distance a clock was tolling 'Be pure in heart, be pure in mind!”
― Anne Frank

“The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life. The physical comforts were certainly meagre, but at the Ritz Paul had learned to appreciate the inadequacy of purely physical comfort. It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. At some rather chilly time in the early morning a bell would ring, and the warder would say, "Slops outside!"; he would rise, roll up his bedding, and dress; there was no need to shave, no hesitation about what tie he should wear, none of the fidgeting with studs and collars and links that so distracts the waking moments of civilized man. He felt like the happy people in the advertisements for shaving soap who seem to have achieved very simply that peace of mind so distant and so desirable in the early morning.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“- সামনে বাত্তি দেখাও'- কতকগুলি বিকৃতাঙ্গ প্রেতের ছায়া ক্রমে ছোট হইয়া লণ্ঠনের আলোকে মিলাইয়া যায়। লণ্ঠনগুলি এই দিকে আগাইয়া আসিতেছে- সহস্র গ্রহ-উপগ্রহ কক্ষচ্যুত হইয়া আমার দিকে ছুটিয়া আসিতেছে। প্রতি লোমকূপে প্রত্যাশিত আতঙ্কের সাড়া- প্রতি স্নায়ুতে টাইফুনের বিক্ষোভ- এই আলোড়ন অক্ষিগোলকের মধ্যে দিয়া ফুটিয়া বাহির হইতে চায়।- তুমুল ব্যাতাবিক্ষোভে আর বুঝি দাঁড়াইতে পারা যায় না।... দৃঢ় মুষ্টিতে গরাদ চাপিয়া ধরিয়াছি।”
― Satinath Bhaduri, জাগরী

“He went back to his solitary wanderings. Believing any set of four walls to be a tomb or a trap, he preferred to float over the most barren of open spaces.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah

“Unlike prisons, psychiatric institutions can be entered voluntarily, and people often turn to them in pursuit of treatment. But when used involuntarily as prison replacements, hospitals mimic persons in eerie ways— and the most oppressed people experience the brunt of the trauma and violence.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“The sequestering of the family in the big house feels to those within the walls like a strange curtailment of their liberty. To those in the village it is no great novelty. For them, even before the wall’s building was complete, to stray about the park, without express permission, was to risk having a leg bitten off by a mantrap. Prisoners lament their confinement. Sometimes to be at large is an equal deprivation”
― Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground

“You create within your mind your own cages that confine you.”
― Steven Redhead, Life's Impressions

“One of the signs of this [screen] promiscuity is the compulsion of confinement which we see flourishing everywhere - whether it is like the confinement seen in Loft Story or that of an island, a gated community, a luxury ghetto, or any space where people recreate in an experimental nest or privileged zone - some sort of equivalent space of initiation where the laws of open society are abolished. It is no longer about protecting a symbolic territory but of closing oneself off with one’s own self-image, to live promiscuously with it as in a nest, in an incestuous complicity with it and with all the effects of transparency and feedback images which are those of a total screen, no longer having anything to do with others but via the relationship of image-to-image.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis

“Generally, ‘confinement’ is not bad. It is natural to be confined. For example, we are confined to this world. When we are inside homes, we are confined; when we are outside, we are still confined to this planet called, ‘earth’. Though the criminals feel that confinement is bad for them, it is, actually, good for the common people because they are safe from the criminals!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“সাধারণত, “বন্দিত্ব” খারাপ নয়। বন্দিত্ব স্বাভাবিক। উদাহরণস্বরূপ, আমরা এই পৃথিবীতে বন্দি। আমরা যখন বাড়ির ভিতরে থাকি, তখন আমরা বন্দি; আমরা যখন বাইরে থাকি, তখনও আমরা এই পৃথিবী নামক গ্রহে বন্দি থাকি। যদিও অপরাধীরা মনে করে যে বন্দিত্ব তাদের জন্য খারাপ, তবুও এটি আসলে সাধারণ মানুষের জন্য ভালো কারণ তারা অপরাধীদের কাছ থেকে নিরাপদ!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“Prisons by Stewart Stafford

There are prisons of bars and jailers,
There are dungeons of the mind,
And of family blackmailers.

Some sit manacled in a marriage cell,
Thunderous isolation next door,
All aflame in loveless hell.

Misery, with no parole in poverty's trap,
While in privileged ivory towers nearby,
Elite confinement in luxury's lap.

Inmates break free to a new golden age,
Other jailbirds await merciful luck,
Destined never to escape the cage.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When all three parties were satisfied with the digestion of the medication, they left me alone to rest. To them, I may have seemed in stable condition, but in reality I perceived myself as an object, an inanimate object, a hollow revolving cylinder undergoing imminent changes due in-part to rising atmospheric pressure while hopped up on god knows what, fading to coma-like sleep and becoming more and more inaccessible to any further rational thinking.”
― Nick Voro, Conversational Therapy: Stories and Plays

“Why do you continue to live in confinement when the door is so wide open?”
― Shree Shambav, Journey of Soul - Karma

“I see several officers in riot gear holding shotguns, as though anticipating the second coming of Bonnie and Clyde.”
― L.R. Dorn, With a Kiss We Die

“The majority of people live their lives under two complementary conditions simultaneously: confined to prisons they don't know they exist and confined to prisons they think they exist.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Reste près de moi.”
― Mat Let, Les aventures de Mat Let: 28m2, carnet de confinement

“The goal of sensuality is to free us from the confines of reality.”
― Lebo Grand

“He shuddered at the idea of digging beneath the surface. It would be stifling, hot, filthy, and dangerous. The ferrets also occasionally commandeered a heavy truck, loaded it with men and material, and drove it, bouncing along, around the outside perimeter of the camp. They believed the weight would cause any underground tunnel to collapse. Once, more than a year earlier, they'd been right. He remembered the fury on Colonel MacNamara's face when the long days and nights of hard work were so summarily crushed.”
― John Katzenbach, Hart's War

“I witness betrayals, pure menace, grim jokes, and the mix of emotions a weeping monster evokes.”
― Michelesthird

“Defy your confines; don't let confinements define you.”
― Aloo Denish Obiero