Quotes About Freedom

But you didn't love him enough to marry him?" She smiled at me. "I loved him enough," she said. "I just loved my freedom more.

I think for you, too, God cannot be contained.

She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr Vesey used to say, 'Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.' I tried to tell her that. I said, 'My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren't they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

I heard mauma say, I don't spec to get free. The only way I'm getting free is for you to get free.

Ich beneidete die Schildkroeten um ihre Panzer in denen sie jederzeit verschwinden konnten.

The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

What is bound will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. That is the promise of Our Lady.

I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

How does one know the voice is God's? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.

Rather than dilute our relationship, the freedom I was claiming helped solidify it. For in the long run, when a woman breaks out of boxes that have limited her, when she sets her plucky self free and begins to nourish and enrich herself, her relationships are nourished and enriched as well.

Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

gon be hard from here on, Handful. Since that day a year past, I'd got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it'd been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn't know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.

You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn. xvii.

We had a signal. When I turned the pail upside down by the kitchen house, that meant everything was clear. Mauma would open the window and throw down a taffy she stole from missus' room. Sometimes here came a bundle of cloth scraps—real nice calicos, gingham, muslin, some import linen. One time, that true brass thimble. Her favorite thing to take was scarlet-red thread. She would wind it up in her pocket and walk right out the house with it.

escape her own father as well. Seizing the moment, she springs Rosaleen from jail, and the two set out across South

I said, "Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.

The kjerringsleppet were a marvelous image for the empowered self. A "woman on the loose" is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away. The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: "To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited." That's not a half-bad motto.

When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you've already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, "I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!"13

time to assert one's right is when it's denied!" "I'm sorry