Quotes About Freedom

Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts had won in the closest presidential election since 1916. Hatless and handsome, he had given people faith in the future when he gave his acceptance speech. I can assure you that every degree of mind and spirit that I possess will be devoted to the long-range interests of the United States and of the cause of freedom around the world.

As for Franny, she wanted what she most often experienced in her dreams. To be among the birds. She preferred them to most human beings, their grace, their distance from the earth, their great beauty. Perhaps that was why they always came to her. In some way, she spoke their language.

Haylin was given a good talking-to by the headmaster and made to write a paper about workers' rights, which he considered a privilege rather than a punishment. He was obligated to write ten pages, and handed in a tome of nearly fifty pages instead, duly footnoted, quoting from Thomas Paine and FDR. He couldn't wait for the next decade. Everything would change in the sixties, he told Franny. And, if they were lucky, they would then be free.

Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said no to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn't understand that every word the judge said was a trap, in that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap.

once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.

He felt like an addict, out of control, unable to stop himself from taking what he imagined he was entitled to, not yet understanding that no one is entitled to anything other than his freedom and the choices he makes.

This is what happens when you stay in one place for thirteen years, Anne says. First you own things. Then they own you.

Put us in a jar, she thought. Put us in eternity.

It was too exciting a time to be tied down to school.

Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need.

Each time I opened the window in my bedroom I smelled salt and fish and human desire. I knew what I wanted: my own place in the world, not a path I took because I was under my father's command but one I had chosen for myself. I wanted to know how other girls my age wore their hair, for mine was still in braids as if I were a child. How had they learned to dance, choose silk dresses from the shops, form friendships?

How's our blue rose? the doctor asked. ... If you really want to know, I feel sorry for the poor thing, Elinor went on. All wrapped up that way. I'm starting to think there's no point in being a rose if you're tied up and covered with burlap.

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.

And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.

thought if I ever fell in love, I would want my beloved to wish what I had come to wish, that the book had ended differently, so that the first Mrs. Rochester might have made her escape.

her soul was in her mouth, ready to escape as a puff of air

Elizabeth is suddenly reminded that she can walk down that road anytime she wants to. There are better things to be afraid of than a country road bordered with scrub pine and oaks.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

She would have to do away with herself in order to have a life of her own.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them. They burned books about medicine and magic, books in Hebrew and in Spanish and Portuguese.

They both always wished for the same thing when they were sitting on the roof of the aunts' house on those hot, lonely nights. Sometime in the future, when they were both all grown up, they wanted to look up at the stars and not be afraid. This is the night they had wished for. This is that future, right now. And they can stay out as long as they want to, they can remain on the lawn until every star has faded, and still be there to watch the perfect blue sky at noon.

no one is entitled to anything other than his freedom and the choices he makes.

She had come to believe that if her father had wanted a docile daughter, he should never have allowed her access to the ocean.