Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs Of A Cage-Fighting Poet Quotes
We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.
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.
A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?
In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.
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.
So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.
I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.
...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.
The words he said, too, must be human enough to bleed.
The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.
How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?
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.
If pain is a pot of boiling water, humor can be the rising steam.
Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.
Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.
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.
Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.
