Amiri Baraka Quotes

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

In S Club I played a role in a band, but now I can go off and be me - My horizon's wide open now. It's scary and it's daunting, but it's an absolute thrill. I feel brand new!

The company Liberated People represents just not liberation of different nations around the world; it can be special liberation days. It can be what the company represents and helps highlight someone's personal liberation date.

Those songs are about getting out; they're not about getting out of family. It wasn't about how family life was curtailing because I didn't know family life.

It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.

I left an office at the top of the Pan Am Building, a nine-room apartment, and a farm in Vermont because I was aching inside. It took an analyst to tell me I could write a note of permission to become a musician and sign it.

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

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

But the whole point of liberation is that you get out. Restructure your life. Act by yourself.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

Real freedom is creative, proactive, and will take me into new territories. I am not free if my freedom is predicated on reacting to my past.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

I have achieved an inner freedom.

I am much more my own man than I was when I was with the Stones.

I've left Bethlehem, and I feel free. I've left the girl I was supposed to be, and some day I'll be born.

Step out of your cage And onto the stage It's time to start Playing your part Freedom awaits Open the gates Open your mind Freedom's a state

More having to do whatever anybody said you had to do. I couldn't really do anything on my own. But as I got older and then came to America and then Grace became my name, it somehow freed me. All of a sudden, I can be this other person.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I just feel lucky that I somehow escaped from the confines of the business class... I feel so fortunate that somehow I managed to break out of that world and get to do something that really had more meaning.

It's nice to finally be my own person.

I don't know what I'm going to end up doing, but its definitely in the right direction for freedom and truth.

When my divorce came through, it was like being let out of a cage because I hadn't been true to myself before; I was being something that was expected of me.

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

Freedom! That was the thought that sung in her heart so that even though the future was so dim, it was iridescent like the mist over the river where the morning sun fell upon it. Freedom! Not only freedom from a bond that irked, and a companionship which depressed her; freedom, not only from the death which had threatened, but freedom from the love that had degraded her; freedom from all spiritual ties, the freedom of a disembodied spirit, and with freedom, courage , and a valiant unconcern for whatever was to come.