Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet Quotes

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My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

I turn to Willa Cather’s quote: Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

Fights begin and end with handshakes.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.

Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet