“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” ~ Gloria Steinem
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” ~ Virginia Woolf, "A Room Of One's Own"
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”...“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and when the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” ~ Jim Morrison
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.” ~ Charlotte Brontë, "Jane Eyre"
“Freedom lies in being bold.” ~ Robert Frost
“Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.” ~ Paulo Coelho, "Eleven Minutes"
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”
~ Stephen King, "Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons"
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” ~ Nelson Mandela
“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk, "Fight Club"
“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...” ~ Sylvia Plath
“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters..” ~ Jack Kerouac, "The Dharma Bums"
“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ~ Toni Morrison
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” ~ Toni Morrison, "Beloved"
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
~Toni Morrison, "Song of Solomon"
