Quotes About Freedom

The writing is — I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea.

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children.

Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him.

she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang's cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the walls she wanted to breakthrough, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed.

Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more,. Lay all that mess down.

I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous.

Hi." "Hi." "Waiting for your sister?" "Uh-huh." "Which way do you go home?" "Down Twenty-first Street to Broadway." "Why don't you go down Twenty-second Street?" "'Cause I live on Twenty-first Street." "Oh. I can walk that way, I guess. Partly, anyway." "Free country.

When one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when one assumes that you can use another's deficiency for one's own generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person's misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams. When all of those things are done and completed, then the surrender and the betrayal of one's culture is also complete.

Todo lo que buscan, tío, es su propio sufrimiento. Pídeles que mueran por ti y serán tuyas para toda la vida.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem.

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe's sons make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, Seven-O! Seven-O!

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive, we were not free, merely licensed, we were not compassionate, we were polite, not good, but well behaved.

Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity;

The one who had been sold by a man battled the one who had been bought by one.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done.

What good is a man's life if he can't even choose what to die for?

If you want to fly, you have to give up everything that weighs you down.