Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Oh, bird of my soul, fly away now, For I possess a hundred fortified towers.

You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.

As soon as we stop trying to put boxes and labels to every relationship and dynamic, we'll be so much more liberated and at peace.

Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.

Oh, to live even for a day in the full light of freedom, to breathe the free air of simplicity! Isn't that the highest purity?

What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving or paying all kinds of ceremonies!

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

I wish we had all been born birds instead.

The one-legged creature is envious of the millipede; the millipede is envious of the snake; the snake is envious of the wind; the wind is envious of the eye; the eye is envious of the heart.

You are free, you just don't know it" ~Michael to Sarah

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

To realize freedom the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time , for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness care for watching, but don't stop and interpret "I am free," then you're living in a memory of something that has gone before.

When you don't need to play the victim or create victims you are FREE

I just wanted to shed everything and do the things I really wanted to do. All the things I was scared of, I just wanted to try. It was like a clearing.

So now I have sworn to bury All this dead body of hate I feel so free and so clear By the loss of that dead weight

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

Meditation is the only magic that can help you to be free from the mind, can help you to be free from yourself, your past and all the burden of the past.

In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.

I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.

There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy; and it is he who has never examined his own heart.

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.

I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.

Like the bright, cool dawn after a night of prison and of thunder, Man can taste that freedom sought so long.