Quotes About Freedom

Crying Call nestled in a river gorge, with raw peas on either side. The red stone, the dark green of the pines, the white glaze of snow, and the arching, varnished sky spread around her. She stopped at the overlook and inhaled it al. Her heart was pounding, but with life. A hawk swooped past, screeching.

The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free—free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?

The only thing I knew for certain was that all around me was more life than I'd ever experienced in all the years I'd been on earth and as long as no one shut me in the barn away from Edmond at night I was safe.

It was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn't a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction.

I never exactly made a decision about what come next. It come over me slowly, ticking quietly at the back of my consciousness for the longest time before I even noticed it was there. But I was halfway to the decision already, living in a hut, becoming what I loved. You would think there`d be a rule to go with that thought, but I had to run way from rules.

Swimming naked in broad daylight is a good incentive not to linger.

It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.

Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but . . .' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman.

To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

And you should try to do what you want. We should all try to do whatever we want in life. I mean, what is the point otherwise?

I want an uncircumscribed world.

But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

And that's acceptable to you?" Faith took a second. "I always weigh it," she said. "Like with Ecuador. I'm ashamed of what happened. But those young women are free and presumably out of danger. I have to weigh that too, don't I? That's what it's about, this life. The weighing.

I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world.

I had a mission. To absorb everything in this world. But also to escape.

there are two aspects to feminism. The first is individualism, which is that I get to shape my own life. That I don't have to fit into a stereotype, doing what my mother tells me, conforming to someone else's idea of what a woman is. But there's a second aspect too, and here I want to use the old-fashioned word 'sisterhood,' which may make you groan a little and head for the exits in a stampede, but I'll just have to take that chance.

This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.

I always feel lifted the minute I taste real air. The minute I see the sun-scorched signs, the swaying traffic-lights. The lab is gone. But not tonight, it seems. Tonight all I can think of is Diane Fleming rolling into town, starting fires.

The earth had set me free. The city was at my feet. I forgot where I was and that I had not touched a pencil in months.

I knew then how I would destroy them if I ever got out of Blessington. I would give Dante LaRosa the information he wanted.

We didn't have wings, but we could dance.