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“Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.”
― Stephanie Hemphill, Sisters of Glass

“Although she deeply resented the gilded cage in which she resided in; she was also still, at the same time, fearful to leave it entirely all behind. For as much as she wished to live a new life, she was also equally terrified. Petrified of the unknown. What if the grass wasn’t greener on the other side? What then?”
― Kristina Stangl, The Ambassador's Wife

“A gilded cage is still a cage”
― Supreme Court

“A gold cage is still a cage.
-King David I

Oh, go cry in a bag of money.
-Queen Christina”
― MaryJanice Davidson, The Royal Treatment

“He knew there was only a slight difference between an armed guard and an escort, but sometimes that difference separated the honored and the condemned.”
― Raymond E. Feist, Exile's Return

“Viewed as a barometer of inner being, the face is seen to produce certain effects in both self and other. By one set of criteria or another, whether ugly or beautiful, the face is seen as both natural and cultivated - and these terms are polyvalent, signifying, respectively, degradation or purity, artifice or grace. To cultivate a beautiful visage is to cultivate sound morals, and thus to be dutiful - which is why Dorian Gray is such [a] powerfully contradictory character. And the face is also and always seen as a barometer of the characteristics of a people, not just of a person - of the lower or higher development of the race.”
― Elaine Stratford

“Just then, the reel snapped off the projector and the screen went black. We stood under the chandelier for one last moment. It cast stars on the floor below us, and we were surrounded by so much velvet I felt like a diamond nestled in a jewel box. But the stars weren't real, and I wasn't a gem. In fact, it was only then that I realized that pretty much everything about the gilded life of Matilda Duplaine was make-believe.”
― Alex Brunkhorst, The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

“Marriage is a mysterious institution, even from the inside.
   Sometimes it can feel like a softly furnished minimum-security prison.
   That was my experience anyway.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment