Quotes About Freedom

What I decided to do in the end was to lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central park and spend the day long in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

Não teria feito a menor diferença se ela tivesse me dado uma passagem para Europa ou um cruzeiro ao redor do mundo, porque onde quer que eu estivesse - fosse o convés de um navio, um café parisiense ou Bangcoc -, estaria sempre sob a mesma redoma de vidro, sendo lentamente cozida em meu próprio ar viciado.

How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I'd skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas. A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I couldn't stand the idea of women having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I want was infinite security. I want change and excitement and shoot off in all directions by myself

can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?

I am a wound walking out of hospital. I am a wound that they are letting go

Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del New Yorker - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.

è come sollevara una campana di vetro posta sopra una comunità dove tutto funziona come un meccanismo oliato, e vedere i minuscoli, indaffarati abitanti arrestarsi di colpo, boccheggiare, gonfiarsi e librarsi nell'aflusso ( anzi, nel deflusso) della rarefatta atmosfera della norma: poveri esserini spaventati che agitano le braccia impotenti nell'aria indecisa. è così che ci sente a liberarsi dalla routine.

What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

I fought and fought to free myself as from the weight of a name that could be a baby or could be a malignant tumor; I knew not. I only feared.

We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quietly die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.

You are a prisoner of sorts, and yet you have made yourself so.

That being free. What would the dark Do without fevers to eat? What would the light Do without eyes to knife, what would he Do, do, do without me.

At least it gets me out of that incredible sense of constriction which I have on trying to find subjects for small bad poems, and feeling always that they should be perfect, which gives me that slick shiny artificial look.

Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. The box is only temporary.

The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.

Unforgiveness denies the victim the possibility of parole and leaves them stuck in the prison of what was, incarcerating them in their trauma and relinquishing the chance to escape beyond the pain.