Tobias Wolff Quotes

If you let other people do it for you, they will do it to you.

When you chose independence over relationship, you became a danger to one another. Others became objects to be manipulated or managed for your own happiness. Authority as you usually think of it, is merely the excues the strone ones use to make others conform to what they want.

Sex, drugs, money, power etc. Just because you get to choose your master doesn't mean you aren't a slave.

Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

I'm more than just a piece in their Games.

I am not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

Don't sell your soul to buy peanuts for the monkeys.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

I wasn't interested in exploiting myself.

They are only after my money, they are nothing for me.

If you allow men to use you for your own purposes, they will use you for theirs.

Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But what would he have been without me?

When you're an actress, you become this thing in people's hands that people are trying to manipulate. I cannot stand it.

Man’s freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs, for need may result in man’s enslavement of man..

You want independence. Go ahead. You are not worth Russian blood or money.

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

If you live your life as a hostage to everybody else's decision, you either have to live a very narrow life, or you have to spend a lot of time in pain.

No man wants to accept they could be getting used for money. But it's OK for them to let us know that they use us?

I do not let anyone use me and throw me.

You're not free in life until you're free of wanting other people's approval.

Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself.

When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me." That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

If you flatter me, or if you look at me the right way, I will kill myself to please you. It's very painful to be an overachiever.