M.I.A. Quotes

You think you know who you are, and then other people have these other ideas.

I could easily not be the person that people know.

If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.

In a way, you kind of get caught up in whatever image of yourself you think is out there.

I'm always shocked when I see myself because I don't recognize myself.

Am I a 'woman of action'? I don't think of myself that way.

I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.

As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.

With a fractured sense of self, we come to depend on what people feed back to us - often mediated through social networks - not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject - confident in what we really are.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

It's hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

The woman who made those movies, that's not me. She's someone else.

There's a constant struggle between my ears about who I am and what I mean to the world.

It's hard for me to label myself or characterize myself.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.

I've got an age that I do think of myself.

Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed-- borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves.

I don't have all that great an awareness of how people see me in life. I don't find myself thinking about it a lot.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.

The way you see me is the way I am.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.