Quotes About Independence

She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

Every woman is only one bad boyfriend or one bad choice away from the street. And she's only one good choice back to the path that will lead her home.

She, who prided herself on her tough exterior, could always be undone by the beauty of flight.

Men will be men, Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. Don't complain, she advised. That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.

But at long last she had some privacy and could go more than ten minutes without someone getting in her business, informing her that everything she did was wrong. As if she didn't already know that.

truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

Some people can't be warned away from disaster, you can try, you can put up every alert, but they'll still go their own way.

Tell a witch to go, and she'll plant her feet on the ground and stay exactly where she is. Instead of doing as she's told, she'll take a knife to her arm and let her blood drip onto the ground, and in that way she will claim the earth for herself and for her daughters and for all the daughters who follow her. It is the future she's claiming, the right to be a woman who can do as she pleases.

They didn't understand why a brave, independent woman had been so brutally treated. Many of them began to wonder why they themselves often feigned opinions rather than speak their minds, no matter how clever they were, for fear they'd be thought of as difficult.

Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

It was a dangerous world for women, and more dangerous for a woman whose very bloodline would have her do not as she was ordered, but as she pleased.

You're so rebellious as it is." "I am not!" Franny said with her customary defiance

Well, maybe that was fate. Maybe she was meant to be alone. She was a runner, and wasn't that the habit of a person who preferred to be on her own?

B)eware of women who have the nerve to meet your eyes, who think they're your equals, who do as they please, who please you as well, who will never do as they're told.

You had best never return, he said. You have it wrong, Maria told him. You had best stay away from me.

To hell with them," Fanny remarked. Had her sister learned nothing at the Starling School? Other people's judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something.

once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.

I'd thrown my fate away once, and I would never again allow other people's opinions rule my life. As a girl I'd done what was necessary, but I was a girl no longer.

I was not pleased to be sent from my mother, but I occupied myself, a skill learned by children who must sometimes act older than their age.

Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need.

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

The responsibility of loving someone is too much for anyone to take, which is why she's done her best to avoid it.

Each time I opened the window in my bedroom I smelled salt and fish and human desire. I knew what I wanted: my own place in the world, not a path I took because I was under my father's command but one I had chosen for myself. I wanted to know how other girls my age wore their hair, for mine was still in braids as if I were a child. How had they learned to dance, choose silk dresses from the shops, form friendships?

Men will be men," Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. "Don't complain," she advised. "That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.