Quotes About Autonomy

I can't bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.

The trick, he said over and over again in any number of contexts, is to disregard what everybody tells you until you have thought it through for yourself.

There are certain things no one can do for you.

You see, baby, you have to protect yourself. If you don't protect yourself, you look like a fool asking somebody else to protect you." I thought about that for a second. She was right. A woman needs to support herself before she asks anyone else to support her.

They also told me how I got the name "My." After Bailey learned definitely that I was his sister, he refused to call me Marguerite, but rather addressed me each time as "Mya Sister," and in later more articulate years, after the need for brevity had shortened the appellation to "My," it was elaborated into "Maya.

Independence is a heady draft, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does.

If you don't protect yourself, you look like a fool asking somebody else to protect you. [..] A woman needs to support herself before she asks anyone else to support her.

under my eye, but not my thumb.

Because the white world demonstrated in every possible way that he, a black boy, had to live within the murdering boundaries of racial restrictions, I had raised him to believe that he had a say in the living of his life, and that barring accidents, he should have a say in the dying of his death.

It is my neck and my life. I will live it whole or not at all." He

They don't give me welfare. I take it.

I got my own back.

You hold your head up. You submitting to me doesn't mean you're anything less...the very last thing I want is for you to be some mindless puppet.

You can't control my feelings, Hancock. You control my fate, yes. My ultimate destiny. My life even. But you can't control me.

I'll take that as my cue to mind my own business

The good thing about being in one's midtwenties is that you know nothing bad is going to happen if you don't return people's texts and voice mails

I finally realized there are no handsome princes - that it was all up to me... that it had always been up to me.

I wouldn't care what she said. She's Luisa Ferrari. She has no power over me.

I am not a vine, to twist my life and twine about a strong column like yourself. Rather we have been as two strong trees that grew side by side, but must eventually lean apart from one another. You would not have me in your shade, would you, stunted and misshapen?

I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men arecreated different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy inseeking to become like each other. DAVID RIESMAN, The Lonely Crowd

I realized I was waiting for his permission to leave

It's not fair. It's not our fault. We have no say in our own lives. We're living a fairy tale someone else wrote.

I've never said it to his face, but sometimes he can be a little controlling. He tries to tell me what to wear, how to do my hair, that I'm too loud sometimes.