Anna Chlumsky Quotes

Something most people don't know about me is that I never grew up.

I'd never been to a prom, I had never had the whole high school experience. I think I was kind of an anomaly. I don't think they knew where to put me.

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

I'm 31 now. I think I'm beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

I'm one of those people that makes a better adult than I did a kid.

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

And we're seeing a higher level of consciousness and many more opportunities for people to challenge their present ways of thinking and move into a grander and larger experience of who they really are.

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

I just wanted to do something about the teenage experience; it's such a wonderful and horrible time of life.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

I was bullied from the age of 11 onwards. I was always much bigger than the other kids. I spoke nicely, didn't swear, and I refused to try to fit in and be like everyone else. People assumed I thought I was above everyone else.

There's a certain road in life most people walk on, because it's familiar, and they can jostle to get in front place. I prefer to take a different road that's less crowded, with many forks, where you get a wider view of life. I call it 'the road less travelled'. That's where I want to be.

At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.

I've always been an outsider. I've always been attracted to roles that would challenge me and that wouldn't come around very often.

I never quite became the monster I wanted to be. I feel mostly monstrous as I more become myself. Because the more you become yourself, the more it disturbs other people.

You have to grow up, and you learn things along the way.

When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'

I was neeeever a cool kid.

The first 20 years had such a profound effect on me, I spent the next 20 dealing with them.

I want to be sure I'm being myself. I don't want to follow something because someone's like 'do this, it's popular.'