Constriction Quotes

I feel like everyone just gets constricted by their parents or, just, life.

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.

Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways.

If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom of the place unless you take off your shoes. Your shoe-constriction has you confined. At night before sleeping you take off the tight shoes, and your soul releases into a place it knows. Dreams glide deeper.

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

Oh, I'm being eaten By a boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor, And I don't like it--one bit. Well, what do you know? It's nibblin' my toe. Oh, gee, It's up to my knee. Oh my, It's up to my thigh. Oh, fiddle, It's up to my middle. Oh, heck, It's up to my neck. Oh, dread, It's upmmmmmmmmmmffffffffff . . .

Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

I'm sitting in a cage with my eye upon the clock.

God has given you a spirit with wings on which to soar into the spacious firmament of Love and Freedom. Is it not pitiful than that you cut your wings with your own hands and suffer your soul to crawl like an insect upon the earth?

With a corset on, you can't breathe properly.

There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there's another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.

When you come from a place and an identity, you can feel constricted and have to get away. But then you realise how much a part of you it is.

Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.

The longer we were in it, the smaller it seemed to get.

Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

When you're in a relationship, you're always surrounded by a ring of circumstances... joined together by a wedding ring, or in a boxing ring.

Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.

It was so kind of you to mention that I don't wear stays. What's the point? If you squeeze it in at one point, it only comes out at the other.