Quotes About Freedom

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual

A poem should always have birds in it.

More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and sing?

Starlings in Winter I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

Truly I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild and want it back. So if someday you can't find me you might look into that tree or—of course it's possible—under it.

Let the path become where I choose to walk, and not otherwise established.

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.

Nobody owns the hearts of birds.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

I don't want to live a small life. Open your eyes ... open your life, open your hands.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. _______ And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier's son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city— turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

I know I can walk through the world

Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight.

And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

I don't want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.