Entrapment Quotes

“Once again...welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex

“Enter freely and of your own free will!”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“When our journey through life's difficulties becomes a trail of confusion and entrapment, we require intellectual and moral insight to escape the entanglements in our future. ("Imbroglio")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People's behaviors are messages, not a diagnosis because I can no longer discern the world's version of insanity.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The bad self is prepared to suffer but not to obey until the two selves are friends and obedience has become reasonably easy or at least amusing. In reality the good self is very small indeed, and most of what appears good is not. The truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, it is its deadly foe. Even suffering can play a demonic role here, and the ideas of guilt and punishment can be the most subtle tool of the ingenious self. The idea of suffering confuses the mind and in certain contexts (the context of ‘sincere self-examination’ for instance) can masquerade as a purification.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“She had no will of her own now, no consecutive thought, no power of concentration; she was being dashed and hurtled into a chaos that blinded her, some bottomless pit, some sweet, appalling nothingness.
[...]
Papa who played her on a thousand strings, she dancing to his tune like a doll on wires - Papa who harped at her and would not let her be. He was cruel, he was relentless, he was like some oppressive, suffocating power that stifled her and could not be warded off; he gave her all these bewildering sounds and sensations without causing so that she was like a child stuffed with sweets cloying and rich; they were rammed down her throat and into her belly, filling her, exhausting her, making her a drum of excitement and anguish and emotion that was gripping in its savage intensity. It was too much for her, too strong.
She felt as though she were a dry stack in a deep wood, and he had put a match to her and was watching her burn.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“College had always felt more like an anchor than a kite, a tedious and time-eating entrapment. Studying for pointless tests stole away nights, rote memorization disappearing the freedom of creation.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“Some men are destined for greatness, other men are destined for marriage.”
― Jack Freestone

“She thinks he represents security. She thinks he might change and be kind to her. She pities him; that enslaves her.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“Ouija Board Web by Stewart Stafford

Someone's been in my room,
Helped themselves to my beer.
Bottled my portal to escape,
And left behind a sober fear.

I guess I'll climb the silence,
To the mirror, if I'm still here,
Tap out a drowning rhythm,
To send an S.O.S. so clear.

A phantom knocking from within,
Coins rub my spirit board away,
Voices say breathe out and in,
Darkest night blurs into day.

Moth to the flame in a spider web,
Mummified to twist in the draught,
Here comes the eight-eyed sentinel,
To finish its ice-cold Arachnid craft.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The secret police have several functions, my dear . . . The first is the classical one. They keep an ear out for what people are saying and report it to their superiors. The second function is intimidatory. They want to make it seem as if they have us in their power; they want us to be afraid. . . . The third function consists of staging situations that will compromise us. Gone are the days when they tried to accuse us of plotting the downfall of the state. That would only increase our popularity. Now they slip hashish in our pockets or claim we've raped a twelve-year-old girl. They can always dig up sone girl to back them. . . . They need to trap people . . . to force them to collaborate and set other traps for other people, so that gradually they can turn the whole nation into a single organization of informers.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Becoming involved in a convoluted circle of entrapment in a specific issue will offer little if any personal benefit in the end.”
― Steven Redhead, Life Is A Circus

“There is scarcely a book of mine that didn't have The Pigeon Tunnel at some time or another as its working title. Its origin is easily explained. I was in my mid-teens when my father decided to take me on one of his gambling sprees to Monte Carlo. Close by the old casino stood the sporting club, and at its base lay a stretch of lawn and a shooting range looking out to sea. Under the lawn ran small, parallel tunnels that led in a row to the sea's edge. Into them were inserted live pigeons that had been hatched and trapped on the casino roof. Their job was to flutter their way along the pitch-dark tunnel until they emerged in the Mediterranean sky as targets for well-lunched sporting gentlemen who were standing or lying in wait with their shotguns. Pigeons who were missed or merely winged then did what pigeons do. They returned to the place of their birth on the casino roof, where the same traps awaited them.
Quite why this image has haunted me for so long is something the reader is perhaps better able to judge than I am.”
― John le Carré

“The leaderships on both sides have everyone in a trap. They too are trapped. If Palestine Authority leaders repeatedly made statements strongly condemning all violence, many of those subject to checkpoint humiliations, night raids and house demolitions might switch support to Hamas. An Israeli government ending all repression might be accused of betrayal of Zionism. Two peoples, two leaderships, a four-way entrapment. I hope there are political scientists and game theorists working out escape strategies. Meanwhile some pessimism seems hard to avoid.”
― Jonathan Glover, Israelis and Palestinians: From the Cycle of Violence to the Conversation of Mankind

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name”
― Sov8840

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name.”
― Sov8840

“Is it possible that Earth is my exile, and somewhere else in this vast universe is my home? That observable universe is my cage, and beyond it is where I actually originate, eliminating any kind of memory and time?”
― Sov8840

“Is it possible that Earth is my exile, and somewhere else in this vast universe is my home? That observable universe is my cage, and beyond it is where I actually originate?”
― Sov8840

“A person can live their entire life within four walls and still have a rich existence, for everything is possible with a unique inner world nourished with an astonishing sense of imagination, art, and philosophy. This is what's called a "terrarium.”
― Sov8840