Quotes About Defiance

People want to be empowered to the point where they can thwart their enemies physically.

All my life I've been rowing against the tide. What can I do? It seems I was born that way.

I've got to tell you, I'm not really a tie man. I'll wear a tie if I have to: If I'm standing in the dock and it looks like I'm facing 20 years, then I'll definitely wear the tie!

I can still crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back. I'm not proud of it. But I was always against society.

Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe...It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.

In this other life, she would not be required to take all the shit that no one else would accept and pretend to be grateful.

The Roman world is falling, yet we hold our heads erect instead of bowing our necks.

It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.

I smoked, I drank, I skipped classes, I snuck out, I took drugs, I stole quarts of ice cream for my dorm by breaking into the kitchen storerooms, I made out with my boyfriends in the library basement, I hitchhiked into town and down I-91, and when caught, I weaseled out of all of it . . . There is no need to switch on the fog machine of ambiguity around these facts: I was still a problem child.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.

In a depressed era when most young adults grasped for any foothold they could find, the nineteen-year-old Smith had already given up a major university scholarship and challenged a prominent magazine's editorial boundaries until he was fired. He wouldn't follow his father's burdened, suit-and-tie path to an early death; he might kill himself, but in a different way.

Not a bird, not a plane, a girl - just without a grain of gravity.

To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over.

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy.

Son, this whole town's my personal urinal. Makes me feel like I own it, pissin' all over the fuckin' thing.

This, I suppose, makes me such a sauce-box, and bold-face, and a creature, and all because I won't be a sauce-box and bold-face indeed.

My whole point of view was, "I'm not gonna change. I'm not gonna get a nose job. I'm not going to pretend I'm the girl next door."

I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don't respect.

She sighed. "Have I ever told you that you're impossible?" His smile was wonderfully wicked. "Have I ever told you that there is no such thing as impossible?

She was trying to make him understand that she would never march to the beat of anyone else's drum again and he was arrogantly assuring her that she would if he were the drummer!