Before We Were Free Quotes & Sayings

Needle&Thread: Kite ... how did everything change? My heart beats for you, my soul craves yours. During the Second Debt we
shared everything. We were free. I hate this distance now. Talk to me. Tell me what you're thinking. You give me nothing,
but I see everything. Trust me. Come to me tonight. Let me show you I'm yours forever. This doesn't have to be complicated.
I love you. Love is simple, kind. Love is forgiveness. Can we forgive each other before it's too late?
Tears ran silently over my cheeks as I pressed send. — Pepper Winters

We're a couple of travelers!" I called up to her. "I'm Briony, and this is Ella!"

"Grammy said I ought not to talk to strangers!" she called back.

"We're not strangers!" Ella shouted. "We're with the union!"

I cut her a look and mouthed, Union?, which was silly with this other girl out of earshot. Ella shrugged.

There was a pause before the girl called somewhat timidly given we were shouting, "What union?"

"We represent the Coalition of Self-Rescuing Princesses," Ella replied.

"But I'm not a princess!"

"That's fine!" I called, sighing as I prepared to lay on the charm with this ridiculous foible. "We of the Coalition of Self-Rescuing Princesses do not discriminate based on social caste, for we believe that every damsel in distress has the heart of a princess!"

"Are you feeling subjugated?" Ella continued. "Yearning to be free, wondering when your prince will come and what's taking him so damn long? — K.B. Shinn

We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign - and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. — Joseph Conrad

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander. — Aldo Leopold

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. — Steven L. Peck

But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned ... There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls, what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves. — T.H. White

Curiously, a principle affects your life whether you are aware of it or not. For instance, the principle of gravity was working long before the apple ever fell on Newton's head. But once it did, and he understood it, then we as a society were free to harness this principle to create, among other things, airline flight. — Andy Andrews

SoulsThat we might break these molds
And free our restless souls
Start to believe
That we can rise above
Our pettiness and love
Like we ain't loved before
Free on this earth
As the surf that rolls
And crashes on the shore
And hey now don't run and hide
Your little heart away
If it's gone
We'll sure never find it
Pining for lost innocence
Tantalisingly I saw
Our shadows moving through the door
Traces from a different time
When I was yours and you were truly mine
All mine — David Gray

Zhou," Biyu said, when Sabaa paused, "before the Jade Emperor, humans were just like the beasts in the field. We ate, lived and reproduced, but we were going nowhere. The universe is order in all its perfection, stagnant and unchanging. The wars set us free. Free to change, to learn, to adapt, to become more than we were. To do that, we sacrificed order for a measure of chaos, of challenge. It let some people, men and women, do evil, but even that inspired many more to do good. Medicines, writing, music, architecture, all the accomplishments of your Empire came at a high price, but it was worth paying. Tonight we reaffirm that fact. Without the power we grant the Jade Emperor from the realms we represent, we would lose all that we have gained. The universe would reassert its control. Over the years, order would take charge once more and progress would end. Given time, our race would slide back into the beasts we were once. It is something we could not survive. — G.R. Matthews

We were born to be free, to expand our horizons by going where we have never gone before, and not to hang out in the relative comfort and safety of the nest, the known. There is a place within us that is courageous beyond our human understanding; it yearns to explore beyond the boundaries of our daily life. — Dennis Merritt Jones

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people - or, to put it more plainly, elves - in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people. — Michael Lewis

We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did — Michel De Montaigne

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion. — E. O. Wilson

The earliest known copies of Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, and among them the differences were mostly small and insignificant. Taking them as witnesses to the earlier texts from which they were copied, it seemed logical to conclude that these many homogeneous texts must have derived from a common original via a highly accurate scribal tradition. But evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to contradict this conclusion. Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts discovered there, many of which are more than a thousand years older than anything scholars had ever seen before, we find not uniformity but diversity, including many significant differences. The logical assumption now is that Jewish Scriptures became more uniform and free of variants over time, as scribes gradually established a more or less standard edition. — Timothy Beal

You said we've got a new page. I figure I've got some say in what gets written on it. So I'm going to work on you. Last time around, you threw yourself at me." "I did no such thing."
"Sure you did. But I can see I've got my work cut out for me this time. That's okay." He skimmed his thumb over her knuckles before she jerked her hand free. "In fact, I think I'm going to enjoy it."
"I don't know why I waste my time trying to mend fences with you. You're as arrogant as you ever were."
"Just the way you like me, sweetheart. — Nora Roberts

Because the night you asked me,
the small scar of the quarter moon
had healed - the moon was whole again;
because life seemed so short;
because life stretched out before me
like the halls of a nightmare;
because I knew exactly what I wanted;
because I knew exactly nothing;
because I shed my childhood with my clothes -
they both had years of wear in them;
because your eyes were darker than my father's;
because my father said I could do better;
because I wanted badly to say no;
because Stanly Kowalski shouted "Stella...;"
because you were a door I could slam shut;
because endings are written before beginnings;
because I knew that after twenty years
you'd bring the plants inside for winter
and make a jungle we'd sleep in naked;
because I had free will;
because everything is ordained;
I said yes. — Linda Pastan

I can't believe you were dying and your last act was to think to free me." Nashira
"Well, I just figured out how to do it. But I wasn't completely sure it would work. I wanted to ask Caleb about it, then he got sick before I could. And all this other crap happened. Since I was dying, I figured it was worth a shot before I went. No need in you being trapped in there for the rest of eternity if you could go free." Nick
"And that is why we worked together to save your life. Why we have watch over you and worried that you wouldn't pull through." Nashira — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The very idea of penalizing based on propensities is nauseating. To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to negate the very foundation of justice: that one must have done something before we can hold him accountable for it. After all, thinking bad things is not illegal, doing them is. It is a fundamental tenet of our society that individual responsibility is tied to individual choice of action. [ ... ] Were perfect predictions possible, they would deny human volition, our ability to live our lives freely. Also, ironically, by depriving us of choice they would exculpate us from any responsibility. — Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks. — Helen Fielding

Now that you're here, now that they know you exist, you'll never be free again. Ever. We're prisoners to our books, our fates planned long before we were born. You're no different than us. Fight your fate all you want, but deep down you know it's true. — Angela Parkhurst

The source of their confident certainty was simply God alone. God Himself. As long as they were in fellowship with Him, they could forever expect His blessings to just roll downhill and right into their lives. He was their righteousness, He was their innocence, He was their sense of identity, He was their dignity and honor. He was their peace. And He was their prosperity. He was the reason they felt no fear. So even though we're confined today to a much different time zone than the one Adam and Eve set their clocks to - back before the Fall struck thirteen and threw everything out of whack - the winning response to fear and anxiety remains completely one-dimensional. It's Him - not the favorable resolution of our problems. It's Him - not the removal of every worst-case scenario. It's Him - not an easy, breezy, adversity-free lifestyle. It's Him. It has always been and will always be Him. — Matt Chandler

Oh, and just an aside here, but it drives me nuts when I hear the current federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, say that the people who benefited from free university education in the 1970s were almost all from the ranks of the better off. What he doesn't say is that they were also mostly women who had been denied the chance of a university education by their fathers, who had preferred to pay the fees for their sons rather than their daughters. Whitlam's higher education reforms were hugely important for women from the generations before mine and that has had equally important positive results for them, their daughters and our whole society. We should not forget that. Rant over. As — Jane Caro

Before either of us knew it, we were in the same room and in each other's arms. I kissed and held my wife for the first time in all these many years. It was a moment I had dreamed about a thousand times. It was as if I were still dreaming. I held her to me for what seemed like an eternity. We were still and silent except for the sound of our hearts. I did not want to let go of her at all, but I broke free and embraced my daughter and then took her child into my lap. It had been twenty-one years since I had even touched my wife's hand. — Nelson Mandela

The gospel invitation is wide-open to all: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13). "Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take of the free gift of the water of life" (Revelation 22:17). And yet when we come, we discover that we were chosen in Christ before the creation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). That is grace. — Jerry Bridges

Oh, thinkin' about all our younger years
There was only you and me
We were young and wild and free
Now nothin' can take you away from me
We've been down that road before
But that's over now
You keep me comin' back for more ... — Bryan Adams

Drowning in the majesty of the constellations is a reminder that the universe was here long before us, and it will be here long after we're gone.

When our bones become nothing but ash and earth, the world will keep on spinning.

People will die, cry, love, and live as if we never were.

But we are now. And that's all that matters.

In this moment, we are.

Nothing but a boy and a girl.

On the cusp of something greater than ourselves.

Entering into the unknown and hoping we make it out the other side.

With a strong sense of ourselves and only a faint idea of who we want to be.

We are what we are.

And we. are. now.

Young, free, alive.

Here, together, loved. — A.J. Compton

If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit. — Milton Friedman

As you say," Tyrion grinned. "If I were Volantene, and free, and had the blood, you'd have my vote for triarch, my lady."
"I am no lady," the widow replied, "just Vogarro's whore. You want to be gone from here before the tigers come. Should you reach your queen, give her a message from the slaves of Old Volantis." She touched the faded scar upon her wrinkled cheek, where her tears had been cut away. "Tell her we are waiting. Tell her to come soon. — George R R Martin

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other. — David Almond

I have laid the stick that connects people together. Now it is up to you, your generation and the generations to come, to build upon that stick a bridge that will ensure the free sharing of information and teaching between the two peoples until the day we become united again as a single people, as we were once before; before men separated us with their imaginary political boundaries of today's Polynesia and Micronesia. — Mau Piailug

I liked him, there was no doubt about that. But I wasn't sure if he was good for me or not. I didn't always stick to things that were good for me - positively railed against it sometimes - but he was a different type of not good for me. He did things to my mind and body that I hadn't ever experienced before.
But it wasn't as if I could get him out of my head either: every moment I had free would suddenly be crammed with thoughts of him. His soft lips, the gentle urgency with which they'd kissed me. The intoxicating smell of his skin. His moss-green eyes that would follow everything I said, then would meet my eyes so we could share a smile. It was driving me slowly and pleasurably insane. — Dorothy Koomson

Battles against Rome have been lost and won before, but hope was never abandoned, since we were always here in reserve. We, the choicest flower of Britain's manhood, were hidden away in her most secret places. Out of sight of subject shores, we kept even our eyes free from the defilement of tyranny. We, the most distant dwellers upon earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by our very remoteness and by the obscurity in which it has shrouded our name. Now, the farthest bounds of Britain lie open to our enemies; and what men know nothing about they always assume to be a valuable prize ...
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of 'government'; they create a desolation and call it peace ... — Tacitus