Quotes About Freedom

One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.

You must own nothing but yourself.

Twenty to life, she got, with time off for good behavior. You come around next spring. I'll introduce you.

No man can justly impose anything upon those who owe him nothing. . . . Whosoever therefore . . . grounds his pretensions of right upon usurpation and tyranny, declares himself to be, like Nimrod, a usurper and a tyrant, that is an enemy to God and man, and to have no right at all.

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ...'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.

My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.

Young people believe that regret is something you will never feel if you simply do as you please, but sometimes it is a matter of degree.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.

she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell.

Do what you want, do what you will, do what you have to, do what you think you cannot.

They believed all books should be read, for as long as the reader liked.

But I was not a mouse. In the fields where I walked, I was much more interested in the actions of the hawks.

She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.

She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.

Men will be men, Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. Don't complain, she advised. That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.

For some, witchery was a choice, but not for them.

But at long last she had some privacy and could go more than ten minutes without someone getting in her business, informing her that everything she did was wrong. As if she didn't already know that.

My father told us that our people had been slaves in the desert and because God had seen fit to set us free, none among us should ever own another man. It had been written that every man belonged to God and no one else. But did women belong to God or to the men of their family? They could not own property or businesses; only their husbands could have that honor.

Her gift with wild birds allowed her to bring them to her merely by lifting her hand. From a distance, when she ran so fast she was nearly flying, it seemed as if she spoke their language, and was meant for their world more than her own.

Tell a witch to go, and she'll plant her feet on the ground and stay exactly where she is. Instead of doing as she's told, she'll take a knife to her arm and let her blood drip onto the ground, and in that way she will claim the earth for herself and for her daughters and for all the daughters who follow her. It is the future she's claiming, the right to be a woman who can do as she pleases.

Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God.