Quotes About Independence

Or maybe she will keep it a garden. An anchor in the vicious waters of the plantation to prevent her from being carried away. Until she chose to be carried away.

A plane dragged black letters through the air: Happy Birthday America—200 Years of Liberty and Independence. Who paid for it? He couldn't tell, so he added: Love, Buckwheat.

The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.

Liberty make a body fertile," Georgina said. That, and the knowledge they will not be sold, Cora added.

She took her hatchet. She took flint and tinder. And like her mother she dug up her yams.

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.

But if he didn't read, he was a slave.

Hard weeks, the kind where you realize you've engineered it so that nobody has anything on you, and that means nobody has anything for you: help, a kind word.

We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it's the only thing we eat all day.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn't help one another we'd be lost out there.

It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn't have to live the way you've been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.

And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

Why did you leave the horse alone? —To keep the house company, my son. ~ MAHMOUD DARWISH

She would not go meekly to that fate. If the rest of her life was meant to be miserable and forlorn, at least she could choose the path that would take her there.

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

U]ntil his last breath no one can wrest from a man his freedom to take one or another attitude toward his destiny.