quotes about independence

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk



When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827



The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself. ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter, November 1981



It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time. ~Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 1829



Perhaps there should be one day a week when you tackle your "Things I Gotta Undo" list. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com



We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. ~James Russell Lowell



God's illumined promise. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (rainbow)



The pilgrims were kicked out of England, quarreled with the Dutch, alienated the Indians, and had an evil reputation among the turkeys. ~Dave Beard



Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home. ~Carol Nelson



A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy. ~George Jean Nathan



Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."



Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. ~John Gardner



Short A: Digging up quotes since 1987, online since 1998.



Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. ~Proverbs 15:17



To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus puerisque, 1881



I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7



I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery



From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.



To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907



It's not whether you win or lose - but whether I win or lose. ~Sandy Lyle