Quotes About Independence

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own.

llegar a un lugar donde pudieses amar lo que se te antojara —donde no necesitaras permiso para desear— era la libertad.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Here freedom was not entertainment, like a carnival or a hoedown that you can count on once a year. Nor was it the table droppings from the entitled. Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.

One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.

She opened the door, walked in and locked it tight behind her.

Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still. . . if her boys were gone . . .

But she had gone on a real trip, and now she was different. She got out of bed and lit the lamp to look in the mirror. (...) She looked for a long time and suddenly a shiver ran through her. I'm me, she whispered. Me. Nel didn't quite know what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant. I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me.

He didn't even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything- and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad.

There was no point in questioning him. Just as long ago, when they ventured hand in hand into unknown territory, Cee accompanied her big brother silently. As annoyed as she was now at her relapse into doing what others wanted, she nevertheless cooperated. This one time, she told herself. I don't want Frank making decisions for me.

To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

I did not want to feel anything that did not originate with me. Because the big deal, as they described it, was that it made you feel so good. I did not want to feel something that was dependent on it. I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him.

she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang's cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the walls she wanted to breakthrough, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed.

Well, don't let your mouth start nothing that your ass can't stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you." "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem.

I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Either I am to live in this world on my terms or I will die out of it.

He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents' past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well.

I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do.

Eran lo bastante viejas para encolerizarse donde y cuando quisieran, estaban lo bastante fatigadas para esperar sin angustia la muerte, lo bastante desvinculadas de la carne para aceptar la noción de dolor a la vez que ignoraban su presencia. Eran, de hecho y al fin, libres.

Any man who has to wear another man's name on the back of his shirt may need to ask himself how he views his own manhood.