Caged Quotes

“I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Giving up is always an option, but not always a failure.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“The storm before the calm.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“I should no longer define myself as the son of a father who couldn’t or hasn’t or wouldn’t or wasn’t.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Ultimate vulnerability. That’s manly.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Fights begin and end with handshakes.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“A poet could kill the dead.”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“It’s too bad war gets all the attention; it’s too bad the plant is easier to see than the root.”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“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.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“It was evening and would be when I woke. No matter. From the maple tree the Red-tail spoke.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“Unreality cooled reality’s burn.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“The historic beauty of BJJ rests not with its ability to allow a smaller man to maim a larger man, but with its ability to allow any man of any size to survive.”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, 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.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet