Quotes About Autonomy

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

I wondered about Mrs. Winterbottom and what she meant about living a tiny life. If she didn't like all that baking and cleaning and jumping up to get bottles of nail polish remover and sewing hems, why did she do it? Why didn't she tell them to do some of the things themselves? Maybe she was afraid there would be nothing left for her to do. There would be no need for her and she would become invisible and no one would notice.

Claire and Molly eventually got their chairs returned, but they haven't chosen to be buddies for anybody yet. That's fine with me.

Suave qui peut —let those who can save themselves save themselves.

I am not like other women. I do not like the things they like or feel the things they feel. And it is better so. I do not want to be like them. I do not want to turn into one of them.

No one can ever make your dream perfect but you.

Aside from blow jobs, though, I'm through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if he's sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.

Why did it seem like the only way to live-was to disobey?

But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

Maybe I have to think about myself less as a woman with this woman's special task, and more as an individual with her own special task—not put woman before my individuality.

Sometimes I think that in not wanting children, I'm preparing for my old age. I know what I want my old age to look like, more than I know almost anything else: a simple home, a simple life, no one needing me for anything, and not needing anyone the way I do now.

How could I castrate my mind--neuter it!--and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy--which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

I have never wanted to feel like I'm dependent on a man. I've done everything I could do to avoid it. Yet men are dependent on women, too, and all humans are dependent on things beyond the human. A

I have never wanted to feel like I'm dependent on a man. I've done everything I could do to avoid it. Yet men are dependent on women, too, and all humans are dependent on things beyond the human.

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.

Sexual intercourse is the only purely reproductive sexual practice and if it is engaged in by women only when they wish to procreate then reproduction is under women's control. Once sexual intercourse is established as compulsory then women have recourse only to artificial contraception, abortion, and infanticide, to control reproduction and childbearing.

For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves.

To me, freedom entitles you to do something, not to not do something.

I like strength. I depend on my own.

It is often the victim's fate to be victimized a second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer. One can chalk up many of black America's problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon. The larger society around us—having acknowledged its abuse of us—wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.

there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.

Fine! Do whatever you want. And when you get fleas, don't come complaining to me.

Any time you turn off and let someone else make any artistic decision for you, you make a mistake.

I needed to grow up and do things all adults do. It was time to stop having everything spoon fed to me. It was about being independent.