top of page
"On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Independence quotes

"And don't consult anyone's opinions but your own."

"In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded."

"When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves."

"I like being on my own. I mean, I'm sure a Pack's best for some dogs, but I've walked alone since I left my Pup Pack. I can look after myself."

"A dynamic person can easily grow and become a civil human when they start to live independently."

"A woman needs a man like a tuba needs a cucumber."

"Don't beg anyone for any form of gratification, be it mental, psychological or sexual, for resorting to such practices in itself is an insult to your existence. Celebrate in your own grandeur with dignity!"
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis

"This was a vision of wildness contained " caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life."

"These tools were my parents' way of saying: What you're doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way."

"I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament."

"I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself."

"I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."

"I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself."

"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."

"He hadn't treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn't found it yet, but I would find it soon."
bottom of page