Quotes About Independence

I had never thought of settling down. I had started believing I was always going to live alone. Marriage was the last thing on my agenda.

I was a feral child. Always on the go. My mother used to sew bells into my dresses so they would know where I was.

I don't belong to anyone.

I would just encourage people: your childhood belongs to you, and don't give anyone, especially me, the power to ruin your childhood.

I don't feel like my job is to be beloved.

After I'd gotten a year under my belt in college, I thought I'd outgrown my home.

a work that no one on the planet can do for us, no matter how much they would want to, no matter how much love they have for us, no matter how badly they feel for us, no matter how much they are helping us in the ways that they can help.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. -Chris McCandless

In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—-not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.

The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.

You should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them. JESSICA VALENTI The Purity Myth

He'd just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted

Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Such ertramp, master of his own destiny.

I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.

Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he'd been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it.

I have some good friends here, but no one really understands why I am here or what I do. I don't know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.

If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again, I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.

We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them -- that we shouldn't go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities.

He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Reuss would spend the remainder of his meteoric life on the move, living out of a backpack on very little money, sleeping in the dirt, cheerfully going hungry for days at a time.

but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude….