Quotes About Freedom

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.

I feel scared and unsure of what to do next, but decide that no matter what happens, I'm glad I ran away. A pony like Smokey is worth fighting for - even if we did get him for free. A pony like Smokey is no small thing.

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

I hunger and thirst so for a bed on the ground that, once freed, I don't believe I can ever go into New York chains again. What a problem-- to have a primeval soul and one's home in New York!

For us the sordid bargaining of our narrowed city lives, the fret and whirl of petty currents that bear us so far from our inner goal-- all were forgotten in that enchanted land.

wandering, roofless and free, over the sun-scorched deserts. . . for in them we quite lost the trail of the twentieth century and of our materialistic and commercial civilization. . . Even the wrinkles and crow's feet that lined our white faces . . . were burned away. In the silence of the desert and the sweep of pure winds our souls were washed clean, till we too seemed true children of the Earth-Mother and the Sky-Father.

Don't cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn't mean to write, leave it.) Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don't even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Don't think. Don't get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.

Keep your hand moving. (Don't pause to reread the line you have just written. That's stalling and trying to get control of what you're saying.)

To read and to write is to be empowered. No shackle can ultimately hold you.

We're always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It's not fun. The life of an artist isn't easy. You're never free unless you are doing your art.

Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.

Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you're free.

Suzuki Roshi once said to his Sixties American students that the way they dressed- with beads, long hair, brightly colored clothes-they all looked alike. Shave your heads, wear black robes, he said- Ah, now I can see your uniqueness. Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination

The ability to put something down—to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami—that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside. You have accepted them, become one with them.

There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

And in the stockyard, beasts did climb their barriers.

The whole summer stretched out before us, long, hot, endless. September flashed like a tiny red warning light in the distance, but if I squinted, I could ignore it. I decided to squint for a while. 'It's going to be wonderful,' I said.

As many as twenty men who were tortured by Burge are still in prison. Their fight for freedom continues.

On the other hand, if the free world is concerned with how a new Palestinian leader governs, then the peace process will have a real chance to succeed.

Believe me, the drug of freedom is universally potent.