Quotes About Freedom

People are told to JUST LET GO. And they would, if they knew what they are holding on to.

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

When well-meaning parents and friends push marriage or nine-to-five or anything on us that doesn't evolve in a way that allows for our art to continue, we will react as if we are fighting for our lives—we are.

How much control are we willing to surrender for the sake of allowing creativity to move through us rather than our trying to flog it forward for agendas of our own?

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us.

If only we could give ourselves permission to write "badly," so many of us would write very well indeed.

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

Aiming for that, I learned to write setting judgment aside and save a polish for later. I called this new, freer writing "laying track." For the first time I gave myself emotional permission to do rough drafts and for those rough drafts to be, well, rough.

Las páginas están concebidas para que nos familiaricemos simplemente con el acto de mover la mano a través del papel y volcar en él todo aquello que te pasa por la cabeza, sea lo que sea. Incluiremos todo, por nimio, tonto, estúpido o raro que pueda parecer.

I learned to just show up to the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping ... I didn't have to be in the mood ... Good, bad? None of my business. I wasn't doing it.

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States. .

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics.

Don't let the hand you hold hold you down.

Where is the voice of freedom, / freedom to laugh, / to move / without the heavy phantom of despair? (From Farewell from Welfare Island)

Vive América, Bolívar, y también vive tu espada mientras haya un solo esclavo que te ultraje o un tirano que pretenda profanar la libertad. Bolívar, America Lives! and your sword also lives so long as a single slave rapes your ideal or a tyrant tries to profane liberty. (From A Simon Bolívar / To Simon Bolívar)

Va descalza la vida por la nube del mar desde que alzo hacia ti mi corazon sus vuelvas.

Rio Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. LLanto grande. El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños, si no fuera mas grande el que de mí se sale por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo. Río Grande de Loíza!...Great river. Great flood of tears. The greatest of all our island's tears save those greater that come from the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it, she said. I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

No one belongs to us, and we belong to no one - not in that sense. This should free us, but it never quite does.

I don't think I'll be getting married. - Cat

Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common

It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).