Quotes About Independence

Alas, we can't control other people. We can only control ourselves.

I need help--Hey Siri, how do you kill love?--but who am I kidding? She doesn't know. No one knows. I have to figure it out myself, alone...

In his depraved mind, power would be the inability to connect with anyone. It would mean rising above the need for affection, for human touch.

Boys my age are stupid. Do you think that means I'm gonna die alone?

The sweetest thing in life is to be alone, as you were born, as you will die, soaking in the sun, knowing that you put the cactus in the right place, that you don't need someone to come along and compliment your work, that someone who did that would, in fact, just be getting in the way.

you're a butterfly and butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye-bye),

She had a kind of internal reserve, an astonishing capacity for self-comfort, and she handled solitude more effectively than almost anyone I knew. She could spend whole days by herself — painting, knitting, reading; losing herself in art and craft and intellect.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

Sometimes, to live your life, you had to protect yourself against what other people might take from you.

The Fiddler's Roost Inn: the taproom and yard. Sometimes it was not in a lady's best interests to follow any dictates but those of her own heart. Because Lady Charlotte Ascot, daughter of the Earl of Ware, had discovered this at a young age—eight, to be precise, during a footrace against boys with considerably longer legs than she—when faced with a challenge to her courage at the age of twenty-one, she did

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one." — Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Campbell Beckett, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

One thing time has not removed from me," she wrote to Grover, "the last toughness of youth, and that is to live alone. I am glad of that; I would be scared to death if I found I was really needing people." One

when you do not seek or need external approval, you are at your most powerful.

You must form your own fashions in a way which demonstrates that you flout the standards from knowledge, not from ignorance. . . But I may flout the standards? . . . Of course. What do you think standards are for?

Marie Antoinette] went to great lengths to underscore the notion that the realm of Trianon was ruled by her and her alone.

Because you can make decisions for yourself even if they're wrong. Mistakes can be corrected. Life is too short to have everyone else tell you how to live. Make a few mistakes, and learn from them. At least they'll be real, and you'll be living, not just existing.

We're in a very difficult position. We have to exercise the courage to give to ourselves the reverence that the people around us can't and won't be able to provide. This decision is frightening, because it feels like we're going against the common social reality and inventing our own—and this is indeed exactly what we're doing—because our common social reality is lacking and ailing.

And also...well...i told them I want to get an apartment with him next year rather than live in the dorms." What'd they say?" Over their dead bodies." What did you say?" I asked whether they wanted to be burie or cremated.

I need to acknowledge that she may have controlled my past, but she doesn't have to dominate my present and my future, too

But what happened the next morning, what will happen every morning for the rest of my life, that's up to me. I think people can choose to be victims or they can choose to be empowered and to carry on. That's what I want. To be empowered.

My own words continued to echo in my head: I shall never marry . I felt as though I had somehow crossed a vast ocean, never to return.

I do not want to take part in my life. It can just go on without me; I'm not giving it any help. I don't want to see it, I don't want to talk to it, I don't want it anywhere near me. It takes too much energy. I refuse to be a part of it. If you have a life, even if you get used to it ruining your sleep, spoiling your fun, requiring your somewhat undivided attention, what overwhelming relief one must feel when it finally skips town.

There's no room for demons when you're self possessed.