cell quotes

Women have no wideness in them Theyare provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

- Louise Bogan
  'Women'.

My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life.Of course they don't behave quite like nurses, because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential'Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!'

- Richard Howard Stafford Crossman
  The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol.1 (1975), 22 Oct.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

-Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.13^20.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh.We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that.We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
 The Presidential Papers,'Fourth Presidential Paper'.

   Hence loathe'  d Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings.

-John Milton
c.1631 L'Allegro, opening lines.

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.

-John Milton
c.1631 Il Penseroso, l.167^74.

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

-Vladimir Nabokov
  Humbert Humbert's description of an embryo. Lolita, ch.11.

Life is foreach man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
  Lazarus. Lazarus Laughed, act 2, sc.1.

   Porque, s | , fuera de la celda esta  n nuestros opresores, pero adentro no. Aqu | nadie oprime a nadie. Lo  u nico que hay, de perturbador, para mi mente†cansada, o condicionada o deformada†es que alguien me quiere tratar bien, sin pedir nada a cambio. Because, well, outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside.Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me† because I'm exhausted, or conditioned, or perverted†is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it.

- Manuel Puig
  El beso de la mujer aran‹  a, ch.11 (translated as Kiss of the SpiderWoman,1978).