Quotes About Independence

The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own.

Think for yourselves for a change. You've been pedlars: go and be merchants. You've been mercenaries: go and find something of your own to defend. You've finished teething and there's the world: crack it open if you can.

Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,' Lymond had said. 'I love you all, but I shall never marry you.

I can live alone, but it is better to have someone else to concern oneself with; to help and be helped by. There is nothing so strong as a family.

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

It won't help you," said Scott. "Nothing ever does. That's why I help myself so frequently.

If you were a dear, good little wife, Janet,' had said Lymond, 'you'd fall into a mortal decline that day, or at least hide his boots.' 'Francis Crawford, are ye daft! What ever kept a Scott from a fight? Women? Boots? If yon one were deid, he'd spend his time in Heaven sclimming up and down the Pearly Gates peppering Kerrs.

There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.

No. I won't. I won't bend my knee, or kiss your charming shoes either. I may possibly fall flat on my face, but that will be quite inadvertent.

One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.

It was of no importance. Birth did not matter; heredity was merely a hurdle; one was what one made of oneself; that and no other.

Our powder and arrows are going to run out on us some time. And so are our food and water and joie de vivre and good books and everything. Why not walk out now and get made into somebody's favourite slave?

How nice," said Lymond, "to have simple emotions. No trouble with principles; no independence of thought; no resistance to suggestion; no nonsense about adult behaviour when it comes to one's own amour propre.

Your right to die? They accept that already. It is I," said Sybilla, "who do not.

Allowed?' said Marthe. 'I have finished with asking permission for what I do and what I think. I have finished with being dispatched scurrying from errand to errand. I am my own mistress now. I am going to move the pieces. I am going to direct the end of the game.

They told me that if I didn't come back, they would force you to marry?' In the plain, sensible face, the brown eyes were derisive. 'Is that why you came back?' said Kate Somerville. 'No. I knew you could handle it.' 'Thank you,' said Kate.

She wouldn't send anyone, nor would she take anyone with her. She organizes witches' Sabbaths every full moon,' explained Philippa tartly.

To Lymond, she said, 'I didn't ask. I don't care what you are going to say. I don't care. I don't care. These things have got to be said. Everyone is frightened to speak to you.' 'But I allow no one—no one at all, to speak to me like this,' Lymond said.

You must, of course, do as you please,' she had remarked. 'But I really think, through all these years, that Mr Crawford has learned to take care of himself. I am sure his unique sense of domestic responsibility will impel him, unswerving, to trace us wherever we go.' Which was precisely the kind of bitchy remark, thought Jerott furiously, that Lymond himself would have made.

All your life you have resented control and brooked no hint of instruction or guidance. This time, your will is not paramount.

No ties; no duty; no relief. Three filaments gone in the life-thread, fragile as the thread of the silk-moth, which has no organs by which it can nourish itself, but instead is born, and loves once, and then dies.

Other people married young, to men they didn't know, and had no dispensation such as she had. To sleep alone; to plan her own destiny. A virgin married, with a son not her own….Kate always said, thought Philippa, blinking, that the Somervilles were mad to a man.

He shrugged. "One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.

She's got sense, that girl; and too much backbone to push herself where she's not wanted. Tell her it's no good, and she'll soon see the point.