Ellen DeGeneres Quotes

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

I feel like I didn't know who I was when I was 15. I don't feel like you're who you are for life, not even when you're 20.

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics.

I think at some point during everyone's life, you finally figure yourself out. I haven't even done that yet. I'm still learning who I am.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

There's a lot about discovering who you are and how difficult that is. And it never stops.

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

I struggled more with my identity. Let's be honest - early on in my first records, I didn't have the power to tell David Foster or other producers what to do.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that's not easy.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

It took me a while to find myself.

All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, 'Who am I?' And I wrote my first book to deal with that, 'The Ragman's Son.'

Every teenager and everybody around the ages from 10 to 18 has to go through finding out who they are.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.

A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I felt that I had been influenced by being in the city enough and I wanted to go off by myself to see what was going on. I remember going out there and looking in the mirror and thinking I wasn't anything.

The growing-up-fast part weirdly happened between the ages of 15 and 22.