The Birdcage Library Quotes

“Human uncertainty”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“No sooner than we are conscious do we go searching for hands to remove our freedom.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“We had reduced nature to what we could extract from it; eternal growth was portrayed not as a fantasy but as the mightiest of pursuits.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“I’d heard of the wholesale massacre of species in that era”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Everyone needs an escape from the humdrum pain of living. The trick is to do so in a manner that enlivens”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“That is the thing about heaven”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“The highest form of love is indistinguishable from liberty.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“The joy of books is that adults will not judge you for your rapacity; it is the only vice that may be entertained quite respectably in public.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“It is so easy to point at this world’s shadows”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Human grace”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“I came home and preached”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“It was there that he showed my sister and me our first botanical illustrations”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Only teach someone to inflict their own pain”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Is this all we are? Is this the best of us? It is the fault of our race that no sooner have we marveled than we wish to possess; and the act of possession is the beginning of destruction.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“We have chased down Wonderland”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“despise how our capitalist system conspires to give the notion that the world is stocked with a limitless supply of marvels”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Just because a thing has been made does not mean it cannot be remade again. It is the only true way to live: we are always in motion. The tides of our days; the rise and fall of our breath. We are remade a thousand times over”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Joy is nothing less than the recognition of beauty; it is the bridge to the sublime”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“knew from my profession that people might search”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Whereas the poor or middle class ask what they can do”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Loneliness”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“So little in adulthood gives rise to wonder: we scarcely know the sensation. But Aladdin in his cave or Ali Baba and his “open sesame” would know what I felt”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“but New York was different entirely”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Why should I go at all? I was not in need of exotic creatures”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“Do you believe in magic? You may think me foolish”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“If you should be a fellow spinster”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library

“We’d built ourselves a cage and called it civilization.”
― Freya Berry, The Birdcage Library