Famous quotes containing the word prisoners:
“We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are prisoners of the world’s demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)