Freedom

"I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us."

"Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification."

"I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints."

"These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams."

"Breathe deeply, focus your thoughts, and say out loud, “The quest begins here."

"There is a difference between ‘off-limits’ and those places you can visit without getting caught."

"Be oblivious to city high-rises, work-related stress and microwave popcorn."

"Poverty is not only about income levels, but for lack of freedom that comes from physical insecurity"

"Before I was married, I thought the sound of bangles jangling on my forearms would be delightful. I looked forward to being able to wear bells around my ankles and silver necklaces around my neck, but not any more, not since I had learned what they represented for the man who gave them. A necklace was no prettier than a piece of of rope that ties a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom."

"Even though he'd been born into a country unshackling itself from its colonial masters, even though he'd lived through nearly twenty years of freedom, nothing much changed for you when you were poor."

"Life’s mystery continued to trouble me A question came to my mind, is freedom dearer than life? or does it become easier to live when life becomes difficult?"

"The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals."

"God desires to free our country from darkness through our active civil position."

"Democracy was supposed to champion freedom of speech, and yet the simple rules of table decorum could clamp down on the rights their forefathers had fought and died for."

"The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;chose “Angel Band” by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks. We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginiaknocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea. No one asked why he was so solemn today. It was warm. It was relatively quiet. To anyone else, this place could feel sinister. But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place. No one was ever here long enough to know us. And we liked it that way."

"If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves."

"We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people."

"I have found out the hard way that the path from victim to victory hinges on one word…Choose."

"Tapping into our inherent sexuality can offer a gateway to deep healing of past hurts and wounds, which are carried in the body and can hinder one's potentials for leading the happy, sexually fulfilled life we all deserve."

"Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. My advice to people with skeletons is to dust them off every now and then-- as long as your closet's aint full of them. It's not good to have more than two or three."