Quotes About Independence

India was a Free Country. You could make salt. Row jam, if you wanted to.

Dava l'impressione di essere sfuggita al guinzaglio. Come se stesse camminando libera mentre tutti gli altri venivano portati a spasso come animali dometici. Quasi ci stese guardando rispettosamente, un po' sovrappensiero, da una certa distanza, mentre noi avanzavamo trotterellando, grati ai nostri padroni, felici di perpetuare la nostra schiavitù.

Io non sposerò nessuno mi rispose. Quando le chiesi perché, mi spiegò che voleva essere libera di morire in modo irresponsabile, senza preavviso e senza motivo.

He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him. Of

choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice.

You do not rush to obey those who seek to command you. Your independence makes people puzzle over you.

Marianne had learned to live by her wits, and she took a severe and cynical view of the world.

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have

He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy -- you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

assisted living isn't really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children.

We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love.

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

When my father met her, he was surprised to learn she lived by herself. He was a urologist, which meant he saw many elderly patients, and it always bothered him to find them living alone. The way he saw it, if they didn't already have serious needs, they were bound to develop them, and coming from India he felt it was the family's responsibility to take the aged in, give them company, and look after them.

This is what it means to have autonomy - you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently.

Whenever the elderly have had the financial means, they have chosen what social scientists have called "intimacy at a distance." Whereas in early-twentieth-century America 60 percent of those over age sixty-five resided with a child, by the 1960s the proportion had dropped to 25 percent. By 1975 it was below 15 percent. The pattern is a worldwide one.

This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Our reverence for independence takes no account of the reality of what happens in life: sooner or later, independence will become impossible. Serious illness or infirmity will strike . It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives?

There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The