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Independence Quotes

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Independence Quotes

“Is she selfish, she wonders. She certainly has her life the way she wants it--a job she loves, a daughter she adores, a companion animal to share her home--and she knows that she would find it hard to compromise this existence for any man. Even in her fantasies of Nelson leaving Michelle (which do occur, despite herself), they never progress beyond the first ecstatic love-making. She never thinks about Nelson actually living in the tiny cottage, hogging the bathroom, leaving his giant policeman's boots on the stairs, wanting to watch the football instead of Prehistoric Autopsy. They would kill each other in a week.”

RelationshipsIndependence
Book:The Outcast Dead
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“It was Gandhi who gave the Congress Party a mass base, a rural base. Four out of five Indians live in villages; and the Congress remains the only party in India (except for certain regional parties) which has a rural organization; it cannot lose. The opposition parties, even a revivalist Hindu party like the Jan Sangh, the National Party, are city parties. In the villages, the Congress is still Gandhi's party; and the village tyrannies that have been established through nearly thirty years of unbroken Congress rule cannot now be easily removed. In the countryside, the men to watch for are the men in white Gandhian homespun. They are the men of power, the politicians; their authority, rooted in antique reverences of caste and clan, has been emboldened by Independence and democracy.”

DemocracyTraditionIndiaIndependenceCorruptionPoliticiansCasteRural Life
Book:India: A Wounded Civilization
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“And sometimes, when I find that sweet solitude, I hear warnings about isolation. Some summers, when I was alone in the wilderness, content in my tiny trailer at the edge of the lake, I would not speak to or see another human being for weeks. There, I could slow it all down. I felt the power of life being lived around and within me. I became like a sun warmed rock in the centre of the stream. The water parted around me, eddied in spirals, and flowed on, gently wearing away all my sharp edges. Once, a man who is my lover and friend, I wanted to be more, came to see me there unexpectedly. I had just split an arm load of wood and was carrying it into the trailer as he appeared. He stayed only briefly. Later he told me, “When I came down the driveway and saw you standing there with the wood in your arms, your face glowing from the wind off the lake and the effort of chopping wood, I thought, ‘She belongs to this place. She’s at home here, alone in the bush. She’s not missing me, doesn’t need me here.’ I felt like an intruder.” His observation surprised me. I heard the voice of my mother warning, “You are too independent. Don’t get too good at being alone or you’ll end up by yourself. Everyone needs someone.” Her fear finds a small corner in me, but I resist the idea that I will be with another only to avoid being alone. Surely, the ability to truly be with myself does not exclude the willingness to fully be with another. I do not seek isolation. The longing for another remains even when I am able to be with myself, although it is smaller, a whisper that tugs at me gently. Even there, in my place of solitude in the wilderness, I found myself at moments wanting to turn to someone and share my awe at the brilliance of the full moon on the still water, the delight of watching otters playing at the edge of the stream. But the loneliness was bittersweet and bearable because I knew myself and the world in a way I sometimes do not when I let my life become too full of doing things that do not really need to be done.”

IndependenceIsolationSelf Reliance
Book:The Invitation
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“To make democracy work, Jayaprakash Narayan suggests, to undo tyranny, it is only necessary for India to return truly to itself. The Ramraj that Gandhi offered is no longer simply Independence, India without the British; it is people's government, the reestablishment of the ancient Indian village republic, a turning away from the secretariats of Delhi and the state capitals. But this is saying nothing; this is to leave India where it is. What looks like a political programme is only clamour and religious excitation. People's government and the idea of the ancient village republic (which may be a fanciful idea, a nationalist myth surviving from the days of the Independence struggle) are not the same thing. Old India has its special cruelties; not all the people are people.”

DemocracyIndiaIndependenceNostalgiaCrueltyModernityCasteRevivalism
Book:India: A Wounded Civilization
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“The truth was, I was not just afraid to be alone—I was unprepared. Even though I considered myself to be a free-thinking, independent individual, the strands of my life had always been enmeshed with others, something that was now being revealed to me in so many ways.”

IndependenceDivorceSeparationSelf WorthAlone
Book:Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
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“It was a day filled with relief and grief in equal measure. I mourned for the fact that we would not create memories together. I mourned for the fact that we would not create memories together. I rejoiced for the fact that we would not create more memories together. I cried because both of those opposing states were true.”

MemoriesGriefIndependenceDivorce
Book:Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
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“Then you clean it up! I’m sick of cleaning it and having you come in and mess it up again,’ Hud would say. ‘I’m not your maid.’ ‘You are, though,’ Jay would say. ‘Just like I’m the fluff and fold around here.’ Jay was in charge of the laundry. He handled his sisters’ underwear and bathing suits with chopsticks, unwilling to touch them whether they were clean or dirty. But Jay quickly became a wiz at stain removal, each mark a puzzle to solve. He threw himself into searching the right combination of liquids that would unlock the dirt from Kit’s soccer shorts. He found the golden ticket by asking an older woman in the laundry aisle what she did to get out grass stains. Turned out it was Fels-Naptha. Worked like a charm. ‘Look at this, motherfucker!’ Jay called out to the rest of the house one day from the garage. ‘Good as fucking new!’ Kit peeked her head in to see her white shorts bright as the sun, unblemished. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Maybe you can open Riva’s Laundry.”

IndependenceResponsibilitiesGrowing Up Too Fast
Book:Malibu Rising
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“What under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgoisie? Leave them alone. pick some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves one while she may. There are such women, and they will love you just as reaidly as any pusillanimous product of bourgois-sheltered life." "Pusillanimous?" Martin protested. 'Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been prattled into them, and afraid to live life. They will love you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more. What you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing butterflies of life and not the little gary months".”

ChoicesIndependenceLiving Life To The Fullest
Book:Martin Eden
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“All I can say is that I’m grateful that in many ways they just let me be. They didn’t want my rough start to cast a shadow on my childhood. From my earliest days they allowed me the kind of independence that many of my peers didn’t have—whether it was my period of digging, or the times in early elementary school when I went solo camping in the mountains several miles above our home. In solitude, I felt more deeply immersed in my surroundings. It felt natural.”

SolitudeIndependenceGratefulSoloImmerse
Book:The Push: A Climber's Journey of Endurance, Risk and Going Beyond Limits to Climb the Dawn Wall
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“Ever since she left Bearwoode Manor there'd been people dictating what she should do, think, feel-- how she should behave. Why, even her grandmother had, but to good purpose. Now for the first time in her life it was as if, like a reptile, she'd shed her skin, abandoned an old version of herself and was ready to strike out anew, every day becoming more resistant to the expectations of others-- of men. Part of her longed to fly free, not to escape the chocolate house or Blithe Manor, but to relish what these places gave her-- freedom and safety, and within those bounds, the liberties they bestowed.”

FreedomIndependenceBetter Life
Book:The Chocolate Maker's Wife
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“I found myself thinking more deeply about my own motivations and intentions. I had now been working on the Dawn Wall for parts of three years. It had become my touchstone, my opportunity for self-expression. The way it started—alone—empowered me in my quest for independence.”

MotivationIndependenceIntentionExpress
Book:The Push: A Climber's Journey of Endurance, Risk, and Going Beyond Limits
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“How does a daughter know that she feels appropriately towards the woman who is her mother? Yes, it was difficult to know what to do with Mai, how to conceive her. I thought I hated her fawning, but what I see I hated is the degree of it. If she was fawning, she was not fawning enough. She diluted it with her spitefulness, the hopeless clawing of a small cornered spirit towards what was beyond it. And if she had spirit, it was not great enough, being shrunk by the bitterness of her temper.”

FreedomAchievementExpectationsIndependenceJealousyResentmentEscapeMothers And DaughtersWill To Succeed
Book:The Book of Not
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