Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.

Ah! when will this long weary day have end, And lende me leave to come unto my love? - Epithalamion

I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away...

I shall go the way of the open sea, to the lands I knew before you came, and the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me the memory of your name.

The only certain freedom's in departure.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

Before I moved to the city I spent every Saturday sitting in church wishing I could be living on my own, doing what I wanted.

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free!!

Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can't I?

I'd fly. I sit and watch the birds go by and say, I wish I could do that.

I was always looking out of the window, looking at my watch, thinking about when I could play football.

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

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say?

I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room

Like the bright, cool dawn after a night of prison and of thunder, Man can taste that freedom sought so long.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

I hate this feeling. Like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares. But they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies just past that snowy window, cool and crisp as the February air.

For always roaming with a hungry heart.