Quotes About Freedom

She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

Patriots boasted of how often they'd been searched and given a clean bill.

Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased.

In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

A free black walks different than a slave," he said. "White people recognize it immediately, even if they don't know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It's in the bones.

They'd never seen the likes of this, but they'd leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this world he wouldn't own it now.

another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun," he told them, "was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!" When

The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

The whip was the standard punishment for disobedience. Running away was a transgression so large that the punishment enveloped every generous soul on her brief tour of freedom.

En tanke bredte sig i hende som en skygge: at denne station ikke var den første på linjen, men dens endestation. Jernbanen var ikke begyndt under huset her, men i den anden ende af det sorte hul. Som om der ikke var nogen steder i verden, man kunne flygte til, kun steder, man kunne flygte fra.

She was surrounded by men and women who'd been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fates. It made her shiver.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility

it was time to get out of what Coach called small-stack mentality. I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down.

It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you've been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

She wanted to tell him so mach, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create.

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.