Ornette Coleman Quotes

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

One creates oneself.

One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful as a gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me; that for me to define myself. and I think that helped me a lot in assuming a leadership position.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

We need a place in which we may flourish and be ourselves.

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.

I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

When you don't inherit an identity you have to define it on your own.

I invented myself.

More having to do whatever anybody said you had to do. I couldn't really do anything on my own. But as I got older and then came to America and then Grace became my name, it somehow freed me. All of a sudden, I can be this other person.

Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves.

I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality... become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.

Women are always being tested ... but ultimately, each of us has to define who we are individually and then do the very best job we can to grow into it.

Don't wait for people to tell you who you are. Show them.

I'm history! No, I'm mythology! Nah, I don't care what I am, I'm free!

Every act is an act of self definition.

If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are we can all be freer. And this is what HeforShe is about. It’s about freedom.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

I used to think I needed a man to define myself. Not any more.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

In their 30s women really start to live... they're not children anymore, and they're not just mothers.

That was a major goal for me - to be able to reach and encourage more women, to encourage them to express themselves and be what they want to be. People get very trapped where they are.

I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.