Quotes About Independence

The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.

what his father had been up to all these years, not entertaining his children but perfecting his world. If you wrote your own characters, they didn't disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

One is the loneliest number. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn't mean there aren't other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn't mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.

But if you went back to wearing pants,' said Roo, 'you could retire ten years earlier.

Hadn't one of my all-time favorite reveries been to become a cranky hermit, live unperturbed in my house, and have things brought to me like a monarch or tribal lord?

Women who live the life of their dreams don't get there by being dainty and darling. They demand what they want and they do what it takes to make it happen. That could mean breaking a few rules, a few hearts, and a few habits along the way, especially the habit of apologizing for who you are.

I think it's funny when people assume that I have to put up with their insulting shit to my face. Rude awakening, table for one please.

Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction . . . .

What couldn't I do now, having already committed such a breach of fashion logic and lived to tell the tale? Why couldn't I pretend to be a woman with a solid core of self-worth, who likes herself no matter what the nearest handsome man or evil mother thinks of her?

I resent it being a truth universally acknowledged, no matter what era I find myself in, that a single woman of thirty must be in want of a husband.

Men. Who needs them when you can have dogs?

I don't need anybody to market or promote me. If people don't want to hear this music, then it's not for them. You cannot please everybody.

The only help I need to live, is unprofessional. The only wealth I have to give, is not material. And if you need much more than that, I'm not available.

Neka žive kako ho?e, a ja ?u živeti kako ja ho?u. Ja ne mogu biti druk?ija… I sve bi trebalo da je druk?ije, sve… Ja ne mogu živeti druk?ije nego po srcu, a vi živite po pravilima.

You can depend on no man, on no friend, but him who can depend on himself.

It seems you are the kind of squaw those Indians would like to have, but make sure they don't! One who keeps her men in line!

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

I don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.

How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won't sell at any price?

A woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.