Joan Allen Quotes

I was trying to learn how to deal with the freedom that I had away from home for the first time. 'Long Black Train,' the song and the album, are very special to me. It was just one of those things that I felt like God gave to me for a purpose, and I've been out here promoting that purpose.

That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

Jurgen loved London because he could get lost here. He said that it was the first time he could do that in eight years. No one knew him or bothered him. It is great for a person to be able to get lost.

I need to live in new shoes and not be a dancer.

I was very good until I left home to go to a little college in West Virginia, and then I started to break some rules.

I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.

I attended College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., for a year, but college wasn't for me. I was curious about life beyond Los Angeles.

Experiment! Meet new people. That’s better than any college education . . . By adventuring; about, you become accustomed to the unexpected. The unexpected then becomes what it really is . . . the inevitable.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things I've never done before.

where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.

You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

I'm still learning who I am. One minute I have black hair, the next it's red. One day I'm wearing Converse sneakers, and the next I'm in the hippie look.

To a frog that's never left his pond, the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he's giving up: security, mastery of his world, recognition! The ocean frog just shakes his head. "I can't explain where I live, but someday I'll take you there."

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

It's like — I don't know, sometimes it's like chasing a pretty girl on the beach. And things I never thought I could do... I can do.

Don’t let a day go by without asking who you are…each time you let a new ingredient to enter your awareness.