Quotes About Freedom

The women cannot go out except to go to church or to the bullfight, and even that is unusual. I consider it a very ugly custom, and if I couldn't go out as I wished, I would leave this country [Spain], if only because of that one custom of the inhabitants.

We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.

I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role.

The important thing is to set the passion free. The drama is everything, the cause of the drama nothing.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task.

Why has she loved ships so deeply, why has she always wanted to sail away from this world? Why has she always dreamed of flight, of departure?

There is a fantastic courage in this, to live without laws, without fetters, without thought of consequences.

Anaïs, you've started the sap flowing. I am not responsible for what I say or do any more.

One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. […] You have a right to experiment with your life.

As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he took her to visit his collection of empty cages.

I do not hold on now. I live openly, ready for the pain, the separations and losses. I am not holding on. Open and free, sad at moments, but knowing the deep joys are worth all that follows. Deep joys. One must be willing to suffer, to surrender.

But I am not free. I am incapable of destruction.

t is surprising how well one writes if one thinks no one will read. –

It is surprising how well one writes if one thinks no one will read.

When I look at the large green iron gate from my window it takes on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since I know I can leave the place whenever I want to, and since I know that human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self.

Though the passivity of woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? [...] Do women act thus?

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our cultures, our religions.

I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, to enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy.

I will never settle down, never have a home. My symbol is a roving ship. I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan. the rest is in the diary

Life's problems were too limited, that it was a pity, that the function of the artist was to increase these problems, to cause upheavals in the brain, to make people wild and free so that there would be more drama to their lives.

Strange that when we finally fly, the separation from the past seems easier to achieve. Height and distance from the earth seem to stabilize the spirit, to liberate it from its sorrow. We enter the consciousness of the cosmos.

You must not get trapped in humanity and its struggles. You must keep alive your contact with all things, your relationships to all kinds of people. When you are too much invaded by others' discords, when you are driven by scruples or guilt to retrogress in order to help others live, and when they try to crystallize you in one role, you lose your ability to maintain and sustain the flow, you arrest the turning of the bigger wheels, you get caught in the spokes.

Entre pelea y pelea somos intensamente felices. Infierno y paraíso a un tiempo. Somos a la vez libres y esclavos. En ocasiones parecía que supiésemos que la única atadura que puede unirnos es el frenesí, idéntica intensidad que entre amantes y queridas.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…