Quotes About Autonomy

Reaching a self freedom is the only object.

I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life - good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn't, and shall never, understand.

I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty –- I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.

That's the thing," said Gat. "Everyone's always asking Harris about everything. Why should a grown woman have to ask her father to approve her wedding?

I am the center of the story now, Jule said to herself. I don't have to weigh very little, wear very little, or have my teeth fixed. I am the center.

So I was a monster, she thought. At least I wasn't someone's little sister, someone's girlfriend, some sophomore, some girl—someone whose opinions don't matter.

I decided not to call again. I didn't want to keep saying things that made me feel weak.

She refused, over and over, to give any single person her devotion, preferring instead to make a home for herself that she defined on her own terms, and of which she was master.

I don't care what you think, so it's perfectly ok.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs:

Western societies are, by and large, individualistic societies. The most important entity in an individualistic culture is the individual person.

That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as Gods noblest creation...even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.

I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms

I don't want your patronage. I don't want your tea. I was quite happy. What do you want to unsettle me for?

independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means

I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life — good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn't, and shall never, understand.

Oh, fence me out if you like! Fence me out as much as you like! But never in. Oh Harcourt, never in.

A man has always wanted to lay me down but he never wanted to pick me up.

Puerto Rico was out of time wasn't because it had no remaining strategies to continue trying to negotiate down the debt; severely limited as it was by the lack of bankruptcy protection and lack of sovereignty, it still could have lobbied the US government on humanitarian grounds. What Puerto Rico had run out of time for was the illusion that it had autonomy over its affairs, that its residents had full US citizenship, that it had anything resembling a self-directed economy.

why make something your responsibility if it doesn't have to be?

I believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments when we make choices that place us outside of the norms and expectations that confine us, when we cultivate the capacity to say no. In

Don't follow your brain. Let the brain follow you.