Quotes About Autonomy

If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out.

A woman need a man to claim, even if it's a dead one.

conveying the message that sexual touching requires consent, you're obviously conveying values and judgments. And

Mother, what is a Feminist?" "A feminist, my daughter, Is any woman now who cares To think about her own affairs As men don't think she oughter.

our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we've been told to experience and what we've been told we have to do, both worry and distress me. I don't want to live in someone else's dream.

I don't remember how to speak for myself anymore

Oh but I need my lone self!

I want to be lawless; I want to be alone.

I can't accept an identity others give me; I won't be your person.

No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

Going back to school is like going back in time. Immediately, for better or for worse, you must give up a little piece of your autonomy in order to become part of the group. And every group, of course, has its hierarchies and rules- spoken and unspoken. It is like learning to live once again in a family- which, of course, is the setting where all learning begins.

Most of the time I liked being in charge of my life, thrived on it, in fact. But occasionally, when I was tired or unhappy. I'd find myself thinking how nice it would be to let someone else run the show, at least for a while.

What I took it to mean was: women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities.

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

there are always four choices to every decision: the wise choice, the foolish choice, the safe choice and the choice that someone else makes for you.

Sometimes you just have to do whats best for yourself.

But once you finally take sail in your life, you no longer crave a captain.

longed for solitude, for space and breathing room without the thought of how someone else might be impacted. Traveling with others comes with a daily series of negotiations: Is the room temperature okay? What sites should we visit? What time should we have dinner? Can I sit quietly and read while you go out shopping? On and on. By default, I cater. And rather than feeling the need to accommodate, I wanted the beautiful freedom to choose, to please only myself.

don't believe in the word slave because no one chooses to be owned by someone; an enslaved person is a human being whose freedom has been stolen.

Liberation for who does not have a shack and freedom for who does not know how to live is fatal.

Unlike the fairy tale princes, real men do not like having to save someone.

I can feel Luke behind me, his weight shifting. "I'm a human being," I tell the waitress quietly. "I am not your entertainment." There may be a change in those eyes, a softening. But I'm not sure. It's probably my imagination. Luke hands me my purse and phone, which is still powered off. I may never turn it on again.

It was also true that after I learned about coverture from my reading, I became less and less inclined to hand over my half of our inherited fortune and all my legal and property rights—including the rights of my own body—to a husband.