Tracee Ellis Ross Quotes

Everyone always said, 'When you're 10, you'll want to be Elizabeth, or when you're in college.' And every time, I was was just like, 'No, I'm Beanie. That's who I am.' So I love my name because I think it really suits me.

I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I'd completely lost myself. It's kind of funny now that people think I've completely changed myself for Marilyn Manson, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, "This is who I am and this is who I've always wanted to be, and I'm finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be."

Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

I think that it doesn't matter if I travel all over the place. I'll always be a normal teenager on the inside. It always depends on how you act yourself, not what happens to you. That's my view of it all.

Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

In the Sixties, fashion was about liberation. It was about setting women free; it wasn't about being unable to walk.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

Women, we are so strong! It took me so long to figure that out, but I realized just how strong a woman is.

There's no better time than now to be who you are.

I truly believe that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

I was given an incredible gift growing up in the Chelsea, a space where it is completely fine to be yourself - you just had to figure out what that was. You didn't have to figure that out in the face of opposition at every turn.

I think the most radical thing you can do is be yourself.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

It is time to search out your uniqueness, applaud and acknowledge yourself, and let your own light shine.

Even though I was 34 or 35 or something. I was like, “People can do that? Women can actually just say what they think?” It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie with her because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

In a way I think why the Ghost story is very relatable to a large audience is that it's kind of a coming of age story and it's a realisation of 'I am what I am - what has happened to me, good or bad, that is the sum of who I am now'.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

By showing that you don't have to lose yourself, maybe someone else will feel some sort of comfort.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?

I think what I have done is claimed the space and pushed it forward as much as I can in relationship to who I am and how I live my life.

It took a while to grow the confidence to say, 'This is who I am, take it or leave it.'

I guess what I know now that I definitely didn't know as a child, is that being truest to yourself is the greatest weapon in the war to achieve. That sounds really negative, but in conquering or achieving something. I think, as a child, I thought I had to be somebody else.