Quotes About Independence

On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell.

But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one.

It's your love," my old friend Pete had said to me years before, when I was trying to leave a lousy relationship. "You get to keep that.

Long before I'd read a word of Virginia Woolf, I knew that, for me, a room of one's own was the ultimate prize. That a lock on the door was the power to think for oneself.

Hush Hattie!" I said, intoxicated with my success. "I don't want to go to my room. Everyone must know I shan't marry the prince." I ran to the door to our street, opened it, and called out into the night, "I shan't marry the prince." I turned back into the hall and ran to Char and threw my arms about his neck. "I shan't marry you." I kissed his cheek. He was safe from me.

No, I won't marry you. I won't do it. No one can force me.

The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing

It's possible that a connection existed between the increasing independence of many women and the surgical assault on them. But it's even more likely that doctors started removing women's sexual organs simply because the arrival of anesthetics had made it safe to do so. Doctors had always regarded female reproductive organs as the source of all women's medical problems.

The dissolution of the normal boundaries between women's work and men's allowed some women to operate with an independence the nation would never really see again until the twentieth century.

There were actually all sorts of New Women, but they shared an independent competence that some found rather terrifying.

I liked my zone small, and I didn't want visitors.

A real man has no need of governments, of laws, of moral or ethical codes, to say nothing of battleships, police clubs, high-powered bombers and such things."76

My mum brought me up to think that personal happiness is more important than your family.

Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety….There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone – not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates.

Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One

The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety

And even as one part of us seeks the freedom to be an individual, another part is always searching for someone or something to surrender our freedom to.

THE TRYING TWENTIES CONFRONTS US WITH THE QUESTION of how to take hold in the adult world. Incandescent with our molten energies, having outgrown the family and the formlessness of our transiting years, we are impatient to pour ourselves into the exactly right form—our own way of living in the world.

I'm not Barbara Gordon. I have to keep remembering that. Tonight, I'm not Barbara. Tonight, I'm not the Police Commissioner's daughter. Tonight, I'm the one who pored over the details of the confidential police and reports when her dad wasn't looking. I'm the one who recognized the vintage costumes you wear. Tonight? Tonight, I'm Batgirl.

All my life, I've had well-meaning guys hovering over me, protecting me when I didn't need or want it. Enough with the well-meaning guys. They want to keep an eye on me? I'll send their eyes back blackened.

Giving hearts enjoy eternal happiness, self content and independent hearts are generally happy, but, those who always expect from others are mostly unhappy creatures.

We cannot learn to fly by following the tracks left by birds in the sand. We must find our own wings and soar.

I decided that I did not want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because these also exerted a kind of pressure, and obstructed absolute creative freedom.

Geeky people often have. . . . a mind with its own heartbeat.