Quotes About Chains

“It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.”

— Elizabeth Alexander

“The guards hate the priest. To them, men like the priest paper the sky with romantic tissue-paper legends, but down here below the earth, in this enchanted place, we know life cannot be contained on a slogan or a prayer tablet. We know that kindness rules with the fist and chains rule with a turn to the sky, that all humans require penance and without it we all seek punishment, over and over again, until the body and mind are satisfied and we die.”

— Rene Denfeld

“That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.”

— Jim Morrison

“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.”

— Jean Rhys

“It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.”

— Wernher Von Braun

“I had not realized how much anger I held against my heart for all the people who use others as nothing more than tools to build a house for themselves, who wrap chains around others and then claim they have the right and even the obligation to do so.”

— Kate Elliott

“Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.”

— Idries Shah

“The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs' laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls' cries. Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken glass, running shoes, a woman's either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the sounds of chains and risen hackles.”

— David Foster Wallace

“I have only ever thought of my demons as constricting-heavy chains that I drag around, trying constantly to wrestle myself free of-their cumbersome weight restricting me in daily movement, stopping me if I try to reach too high or go too far. The thought that I could actually put this personality quirk to good use-to help someone instead of hurt them-has put a glimmer of hope into my heart. A glimmer that I am trying my best to ignore.”

— Alessandra Torre

“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart ... To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty ... and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted.
[For the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789]”

— Benjamin Franklin

“Only the fire of life can melt the chains of death.”

— Rick Riordan

“Break the chains.”

— Pierce Brown

“Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“My generals should be like bull terriers on chains, and they should want war, war, war ... But what happens now? I want to go ahead with my aggressive politics and the generals try to stop me. That's a false situation.”

— Adolf Hitler

“Loving someone you want to make your own has a different feeling, a different power than the love you have for family. It's different and the chains that bind it can be unbreakable.”

— Jay Crownover

“Tis I, my sweet, your rough-and-ready man
Well hid by night to beg your fine white hand
Though king of bandits, draped in chains of gold
I'm poor in love and suffer grief untold”

— Shannon Hale

“Freedom's chains are the hardest to break.”

— Marty Rubin

“Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I have many deep thoughts in God, but I take my own measure, lest I perish by boasting ... For I myself, though I am in chains and can comprehend heavenly things, the ranks of the angels and the hierarchy of principalities, things visible and invisible, for all this I am not yet a disciple.”

— Ignatius Of Antioch

“Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.”

— John Henrik Clarke

“Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?"
"The what?"
"The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition."
"What is it?"
"He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that line is actually circular.”

— Scott Lynch

“Crooked Warden," said Chains. "Just this morning I was suffering from the delusion that I was handing out the educations here.”

— Scott Lynch

“Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.”

— Stephen King

“He did not recognize the guards standing watch at the gates he had once protected so proudly, the gates he had ridden through not even a year ago with an assassin newly freed from Endovier, her chains tied to his saddle.
Now she led him in chains through those gates, an assassin one last time.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“It might have been preferable," Eddis admitted, dryly, "if you had thrown off your chains of bondage solely for love of me. It would certainly have been more flattering." Standing so near to him, she was looking up into his face and watching it closely. "I am willing to accept, however, that we are real people, not characters in a play. We do not, all of us, need to be throwing inkwells. If we are compatible with one another, is that not sufficient?"
"Were I a king in more than just name, it would be all, all I dreamed of," said Sounis, and it was Eddis who blushed.
"You wish to wait, then, until you are confirmed as Sounis?"
"If ... "
"When," said Eddis, firmly.
"Yes," said Sounis, "then.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

“Man is born free but today everywhere he is in chains.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

“Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“The child, who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.”

— Danny Meyer

“I don't belong there."
"You do. Because of who you are. WHAT you are. One half brimming with dark curiosities and a fierce appetite for all things mad. But the other half whimsy and light - filled with courage and loyalty."
He bites his lower lip, a gesture so minute I might've imagined it.
"Nothing can break the chains you have on my heart. For you ARE Wonderland."
-Unhinged, pg 179”

— A.G. Howard

“The blaze from the trees spreads to tablecloths and crepe paper - a chain reaction so brilliantly spectacular and terrible, I ache to be a part of it ... to devour and destroy,then relish in the plunder.
I could do it.I could stand here amid the flames,let them lap at my skin,and laugh in a death-defying haze - because they belong to me. I could watch the world crumble and then dance,triumphant,in the snowfall of ash left behind.
All I have to do is set the power free. Escape the chains of my humanity,let madness be my guide.”

— A.G. Howard

“What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don't even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don't want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I'll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.”

— Tarryn Fisher

“I will buy you back with My blood because I love you. I will free you from the chains of sin. I will settle the conflict within and give peace to your soul. But you must come to Me with a repentant heart. You must be willing to be redeemed. You must exchange your sin-blackened heart for a new heart that is cleansed by My blood.”

— Billy Graham

“Let the blacksmith wear the chains he has himself made.”

— Decimius Magnus Ausonius

“Retail chains charge tens of thousands of dollars to place a particular candy bar in the racks near the register. Very few people, after all, head into”

— Steve Almond

“Since a woman must wear chains, I would have the pleasure of hearing 'em rattle a little.”

— George Farquhar

“We are like the explorers of a great continent, who have penetrated its margins in most points of the compass and have mapped the major mountain chains and rivers. There are still innumerable details to fill in, but the endless horizons no longer exist.”

— H. Bentley Glass

“Everywhere animals are in chains, but we image them as free.”

— Carol J. Adams

“You can never go wrong betting on Americans' bad eating habits. So I've made a ton investing in all fast food chains, while at the same time investing in Dockers, spandex, Spanx, and sweatpants. Basically, anything with an elastic waistband is a goldmine.”

— Carol Leifer

“What's so funny?" "Your panties have a bow," he said. I looked down. I was wearing a short tank top -not mine- and my blue panties with a narrow white strip of lace at the top and a tiny white bow. Would it have killed me to check what I was wearing before I pulled the blanket down? "What's wrong with bows?" "Nothing." He was grinning now. "I expected barbed wire. Or one of those steel chains." Wiseass. "I'm secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft." "I bet.”

— Ilona Andrews

“Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.”

— Alain De Botton

“Liberty has as many chains as an iron-monger's shop, and as rusty.”

— Austin O'Malley

“The marks of Jesus are imprisonment, chains, scourgings, blows and stoning in bearing testimony to the Gospel. Galatians 6:17 - 17 Finally, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.”

— John Calvin

“The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. To free one's mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered.”

— John Dewey

“The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.”

— Warren Buffett

“There are internal chains and external chains. All the external chains in the world won't enslave you, if you are free inside. And all the external 'freedom' in the world won't liberate you, if you are chained inside.
Let go. And you'll know Freedom.”

— Yasmin Mogahed