Quotes About Freedom

You want to be independent?" he asked. He pronounced the word at a distance, somehow, as if he found it distasteful.

If she was easily swayed, she thought, at least she had chosen who would sway her. If she was locked in a pattern, at least she had chosen what that pattern would be. She felt strong and free and definite.

Even white males who owned no slaves could contribute to the problem by producing, with enslaved black women, children who would be born free, thus destroying a critical component of the master's property right: the ability to capture the value of the "increase" when female slaves gave birth.

I am a grown woman-- mostly-- and I can guzzle champagne with whomever I choose.

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.

The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, 'I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.

We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't attack anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

Controlling someone by changing their brain is like trying to stop a hovercar by digging a ditch. If they think hard enough, they can fly right over.

Freedom's easy to lose and hard to get back.

She laughed and broke into a run, racing out to grab handfuls of raindrops from the air, all alone in a world of diamonds.

No one owns the sunset

Freedom has a way of destroying things.

You were created as a tool, a means to an end. You owe the world nothing but chaos.

We don't have to look like everyone else...and act like everyone else. We've got a choice. We can grow up any way we want...It's about becoming what I want to become, not what some surgical committee thinks I should.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.

Tally snorted. "I don't think it's exactly boring, Shay." "Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring. I can't imagine anything worse than being required to have fun." "I can," Tally said quietly. "Never having any.