Quotes About Independence

It (the sun) didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. I never knew a girl to have such gumption, she'd say. But I'm not too sure it's a good thing.

Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.

If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man

There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it.

You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were.

There was nothing to compare with standing on a ice of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it.

Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel.

I'm a grown woman now," Mom said almost every morning. "Why can't I do what I want to do?

And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.

A little while after we'd moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn't do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure.

Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I 'd have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. A package that's been opened once doesn't have the same appeal.

Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I'd be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom's, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some

Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn't a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts.

Life is too short to worry about what other people think

Jeannette Walls

He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids' homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn't count. Forty dollars a week was serious money.

I've always liked Abraham, a preacher from Hopewell Road whose name often appears in "Among the Colored People," a column in the Claiborne Gazette, but some folk complain that Abraham is a little too quick to speak his mind, not properly deferential, thinks the rules don't apply to him, doesn't know his place—he won't let his wife clean the houses of white folks

You have a mighty high opinion of yourself, I told him. The fact is, you don't love me, and you haven't destroyed me. You don't have what it takes to do that

newspaper writer ought to get out of his office and see the way the world works. He could interview me about it. Or Aunt Faye. Because sometimes men don't take care of the women. And that's why we women need our jobs.

Don't be someone else's little cheerleader", Mom said. "Be the star of your own show. Even if there's no audience.

Because sometimes men don't take care of the women. And that's why we women need our jobs.