― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
― Jean-Paul Sartre
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
― Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems
― Franz Kafka, Amerika
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
― E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
“And I want to be held down. I don’t know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
― Franz Kafka
