Charles Dickens Quotes

I think everyone starts in the mailroom at some point! It's a right of passage. Your boss has to throw something at you and order you around for at least two years.

My life is not unlike Truman's. I can't go anywhere.

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

Go and lie down in the dark... for hours... and don't move. I'm locking the door now

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

They seal the subway change-booth guy up inside this thing with bullet-proof glass, closed in on all sides, it's like some kind of Houdini torture tank of doom. How do you breathe in there? It looks like if you put your hand over the change slot, you could suffocate him in thirty seconds.

Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me; from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of Nature's works, to me expung'd and raz'd, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

Let people hide in their homes, caged like chickens. Cowards deserve no better.

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

When you say 'Bedtime, bedtime, bedtime!' that's not what the child hears. What the child hears is 'Lie down in the dark... for hours... and don't move... I'm locking the door now.'

I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.

Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it.

I built a jail in my closet and I would incarcerate my family from time to time.

I think the silence would be good with me, and not interacting with people would be okay. But not being able to move outside of the space would be hard. Not being able to walk around - the stillness of my body, physically - that would be the challenge.

Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.