William Butler Yeats Quotes

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It's not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it's about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.

I'm always touched by people's different stories of who they are and why they made the choices that they made. I feel so empowered by the story behind the person.

Everybody has their own story - it's who you are. If I wasn't five-foot, I wouldn't be who I am!

I find that I relate to most of the characters that I play on a really personal level, just because we're the same age, we're girls, and we're growing. I can find myself in those roles, so it makes it easy to connect to. But all of them are their own person - they're all hard to understand and hard to figure out, just like I am.

It's better to know your story than not to know.

My style is raw; my style is '95. My style is what I live. My style is my story.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

It's hard to define somebody by one movie. I mean, unfortunately, my entire life was basically made by Billy Elliot. It was kind of created by that one catalytic moment.

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.

myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth

Don’t discount that part of who he was just because you didn’t know it. None of us are all of who we are to any one person.

Once you know the world you know how your character fits into it.

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.

Let me tell you a secret: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated.We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It's very important. Maneck smiled. 'Why is it important?' It's extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world.

I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Not everyone has a purpose.

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.

The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.