Quotes About Independence

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

I will cut adrift—I will sit on pavements and drink coffee—I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim—this fine October.

Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.

to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.

Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For, he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, I have done with men.

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. 'That's your course, world,' one says, 'mine is this.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless.

It's something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash … free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous… ecstasy — it's ecstasy that matters.

For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen.

For," the outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man

when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.