Quotes About Independence

When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool.

That's why she keeps her nails long, she says, to be able to scratch and claw.

His quarry parties were the stuff of legend—trash cans brimming with wapatuli, music that was cool on the coasts but wouldn't reach Midwest airwaves for another six months, daring leaps from the highest granite cliffs into the inky pools below, some more than a hundred feet straight down. No gradual decline, just a fathomless, aching cavity scooped out of the earth, a wound that cold water seeped in to fill like blood.

I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life.

Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means! ~Alvis

Elena reminds him that without his dad's union job, he wouldn't have had a roof over his head, but he's one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he's made his own way in the world.

but in Claire's mind it would always be Holly Golightly who stole her daddy. We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us.

But when you see yourself as an individual first, you are freed to think for yourself, and you become internally self-sufficient. You start to break free from the bonds of racial conformity, and you start to see the good and bad in everyone, irrespective of their color. You start to be less angry, and as you let go of anger you are empowered to love God, your family, and your country.

Your choice comes from strength, not from dependence. - Justin

I wanted to see who I was, without using another person's love for me as a measurement of my value.

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.

I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.

Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.

Ashoke suspects that Mrs. Jones (the secretary at his new job as a professor) ...is about his own mother's age. Mrs. Jones leads a life that Ashoke's mother would consider humiliating: eating alone, driving herself to work in snow and sleet, seeing her children and grandchildren, at most, three or four times a year.

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.

There's no point discussing it given that she's blind to the small pleasures my solitude affords me. In spite of how she's clung to me over the years my point of view doesn't interest her, and this gulf between us has taught me what solitude really means.

You, who chafed at the collective we created, who only wanted to subtract yourself, always, from the equation, throwing it off-balance.

He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also—he could admit this to himself now—to take a step that Udayan never would.

had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.

It's the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school.

in August to celebrate an important anniversary of her in-laws. "I wish I didn't have to go, after three days with them I start to lose it." I almost ask: Isn't that the case with your husband and kids, with your house? Isn't that why you're always traveling, why you leave them behind every other week? I don't say this. I'm fond of my friend, I let her blow off steam. The sun beats down on us and chafes the skin below my sweater.

Subhash was angry with himself for going along with it. For still needing to prove he could. He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan would cease to be brothers, were Subhash to resist him.

He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like him, but because of a past they happen to share.

As Americans, we can choose where we work and live, what we drive, which insurance plan is best for us, so why can we not give workers a choice when it comes to their retirement?