Quotes About Freedom

You could be who you wanted to be in the city. You could be whoever you were deep inside. It was like a garden of people, the only place where I didn't feel alone in a crowd.

You make love what you want it to be, Hannah had told her. You decide. You walk toward it, or you walk away.

We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice, we discovered we could fly. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky (p.397).

Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else's business.

I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. 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 wore a wide-brimmed black hat and men's trousers, and she carried a satchel of books to ensure that if she should finish one volume she would be handily prepared with the next.

Do as you will, but harm no one. What you give will be returned to you threefold.

When you chain something up, you turn him into something he shouldn't be.

Just like you still think you'll be happier if you run away.

With silver and a wagon to take you to Boston or New York. I can keep the girl.

As the summer passed, I began to feel free. I had time to myself, and I enjoyed watching over the children. I felt a sort of joy I'd never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.

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.

You don't have to worry about the curse anymore," she'd reassured him as they'd walked along the landscape of their past

You could live a little or you could live a lot.

In truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

Love could ruin your life or set you free; it could happen by chance or be a well-planned decision.

Curses are like knots, the more you struggle to be free, the tighter they become, whether they're made of rope or spite or desperation.

James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never find their true song.

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

As soon as he is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his natural growth will be violently interrupted.

Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them—perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

The once-beaten children still living inside adults often fear being punished if they dare to truly SEE, without illusions, what their parents did to them in their first years of life. Once they understand that this danger no longer exists, they can liberate their life.

This new awareness is frequently a result of encounters with feeling individuals who have been lucky enough to grow up surrounded by love and respect, who have had a less troubled childhood, who have experienced pleasure and freedom and have thus been able to lead easier, happier lives.