Quotes About Freedom

Not only is there no way to make everyone happy, it's nearly impossible to make anyone happy. And anyway, most people only think they want to be happy. Including me. There's something wildly freeing about knowing that.

Self-appointed defenders of freedom seem to know nothing of the loss of liberty attendant upon seriously adverse economic conditions. No regimentation is more cruel than that of extreme poverty. The cramped and barren lives of millions of sharecroppers in the southern states, the deplorable conditions in some of the coal-mining areas, the slum districts in almost any large city, are a pitiful contradiction to our boasted 'inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can't fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly.

A book lets you choose how much of the blood you want to see. A book gives you the permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs.

In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped. Just like me.

We're like, do whatever. Chill out. Be gay. Be straight. I mean, what is the big deal? We're all gonna die anyway, you know? Who wants to spend their precious life hating?

I gave her as much as I had, but it's like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much blood you want to see. A book gives you permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret.

America, GET RID OF YOUR GOD DAMN GUNS.

you're a butterfly and butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye-bye),

you're a butterfly and butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye-bye), and I follow her each day because you are not a butterfly as long as she exists. You are not free to fly, fly away because she is a dangerous fucking pervert, photographing you, coveting you. Is there anything sicker than photographing someone while she's sleeping?

The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can't fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.

The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

Death either destroys us or frees us.

but travel, to new places where she could swim and write, while escaping the ensnaring kitchen of life, was becoming the one prospect that unfailingly brought the promise of pleasure.

Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential. Fire harkens back to our wilder selves, the parts we let out only when we think no one is looking.

Because you can make decisions for yourself even if they're wrong. Mistakes can be corrected. Life is too short to have everyone else tell you how to live. Make a few mistakes, and learn from them. At least they'll be real, and you'll be living, not just existing.

If I could have been a cowgirl, I might have never written a word.

Sometimes, you just have to walk away and never look back.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

I need to acknowledge that she may have controlled my past, but she doesn't have to dominate my present and my future, too

you are an eagle among canaries. You were born to soar.

My own words continued to echo in my head: I shall never marry . I felt as though I had somehow crossed a vast ocean, never to return.