Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

I'm like a caged animal sometimes. Let me yearn to breathe free.

My cage has many rooms.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

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

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

You'll never know how sweet freedom can be unless you've lost it for eight and a half years.

I really like cages.

To arrive is to be in prison.

There can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don't have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function.

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

A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner.

I have never in my life walked with a harness. The weight of the tether, makes it feel like I'm dragging an anchor behind me.

I've come out of a small jail and entered a bigger one.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

Most of us are imprisoned by something. We're living in darkness until something flips on the switch.

Man is everywhere still in chains.