Quotes About Autonomy

Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

People make their own choices, and sometimes those choices suck.

People create their own little hells. They don't need my help

Then I realized something. I controlled half of the relationship, my half. I could have my half of the relationship.

If you are not aware of the story pattern you are living, the story plays you.

Women do not benefit from doctrinaire regulations of the one right way to be

Just eat it and shit it and be done with it and don't feel special cuz you eat that shit with someone because in the end we all shit alone!

Alas, we can't control other people. We can only control ourselves.

The sweetest thing in life is to be alone, as you were born, as you will die, soaking in the sun, knowing that you put the cactus in the right place, that you don't need someone to come along and compliment your work, that someone who did that would, in fact, just be getting in the way.

So you did think of it as my 'job' to carry your offspring into this world. The second you knew about your seed planted inside of me, I stopped being a person to you.

Meg often slept with men she didn't want to sleep with: she didn't know how to say no. More precisely, she didn't know she was allowed to say no.

attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something—or someone—outside yourself almost always has disastrous results.

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one." — Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Campbell Beckett, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

One thing time has not removed from me," she wrote to Grover, "the last toughness of youth, and that is to live alone. I am glad of that; I would be scared to death if I found I was really needing people." One

when you do not seek or need external approval, you are at your most powerful.

from her earliest days at Versailles, Marie Antoinette staged a revolt against entrenched court etiquette by turning her clothes and other accoutrements into defiant expressions of autonomy and prestige . . . it is my belief that she identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival.

Marie Antoinette] went to great lengths to underscore the notion that the realm of Trianon was ruled by her and her alone.

Unlike a Eugenie or a Jackie, but quite like her ancestor the Sun King, Marie Antoinette helped invent fashion as a high-stakes political game - one that she played in dead earnest, and with deadly results. A winner-take-all affair, her program of singular sartorial defiance implicated not just her autonomy and her prestige, but her crown and, eventually, her life.

I need to acknowledge that she may have controlled my past, but she doesn't have to dominate my present and my future, too

Does "doing exactly what I want" mean not thinking about other people's feelings? Because that's just not the kind of person I am. Maybe it can mean whatever I want it to mean, like taking care of myselfand not letting people walk over me

I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.

Mike Nichols used to say we were two flowers, no gardener. No one was minding the relationship.

I feel like what I look like is government issue, it's pretty much out of my hands. But I invent the stuff I say. That's me.

I'm not a damsel and there is no distress