Quotes About Freedom

I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!

I'd wish you good luck, but you won't need it. You get to write your own story now. Nothing's luckier than that.

Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine...

She might be a captive, but in this room, with a book in her hand, she could be free.

She was sorry for all the grim-tale girls locked in lonely towers. Trapped in sugar houses. Lost in the dark woods, with a huntsman coming to cut out their hearts.

A pretty girl must please the world. But an ugly girl? She's free to please herself.

Weaver always says freedom is like Sloan's Liniment, always promising more than it delivers.

Never is a wolf more dangerous than when he is in a cage.

What can I say? I merely wish to smoke. Sparky can forgive that. You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that.

Fear enslaved us," he said. "He made us vicious. You freed us. We are here to thank you for that and to pledge our allegiance to you. Our code of honor demands no less. You will be our ruler now. We are yours to command, your loyal servants.

on a boat, the better.

I will go out again this very night with my rockets and fuses. I will blow them straight out of their comfortable beds. Blow the rooftops off their houses. Blow the black, wretched night to bits. I will not stop. For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.

I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I'm lost in the music. Until I am the music--notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it's okay because when I'm the music, I'm not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty.

But you can't live your life worried about dying all the time. If you do, you're dead already.

It's going to be a pretty day to fly.

I knew why I was claustrophobic, all right. But knowing why didn't make it go away. I wondered what it would be like to see the dark blue sky above us not as heavy drapes of cloth, the top of a circus tent, but as an infinite expanse. As everybody else saw it.

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

The opposite: disembodied, he believed, Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world. At last they could move and gather at will, without pressure from the likes of Lizzie's parents: those faceless Texans who opposed Bix without knowing he existed. The

She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone.

The secret to a happy ending, Mom used to tell us, is knowing when to walk away.

And yet, as it turns out, nothing is harder than loving human beings. In part, this is because we don't know what we want. Or, on those unlikely occasions when we do know what we want, we often don't know how to put our desire into words. Instead, a lot of the time we act like my old friend Gomer, snarling and slathering at the end of our chains, driven to fury not only by our imprisonment but also by the presence of others who appear to us to be undeservedly walking free.

I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.

I wasn't a woman who stayed tiny like I thought I would. I definitely gave myself the freedom to eat what I wanted.

I'm privileged, because I have a lot of freedom. I want to use it to make as warm and normal a life as I can for our daughters.