Boris Pasternak Quotes

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

Trapped' is unique because it focuses on one character who is stuck in an apartment.

There's no way out of here.

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

I limited myself to one shout a day. But I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. And I knew from experience you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself.

A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.

And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some window so that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, because I'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take me away from you.

I am a poem. There is no way out.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,- When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings- I know why the caged bird sings!

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

Dayodhuam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

Outside, you don't hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.... I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage.

What do you fear, lady?' he asked. 'A cage,' she said.

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'.

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.

I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape.