Olivia Williams Quotes

A career is a series of ups and downs, of comebacks.

It was good for us, I suppose. Those kinds of times produce qualities in us that make us better for having had them. My parents were not getting along. My mother was quite intolerant of friendships that were being developed.

Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner. Really, time is your soul mate.

One good maxim to keep in mind, and I can't remember who said it, "You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way."

Life is a series of relapses and recoveries.

I really needed to have something in my life, because I realized there were other things more important than my career. So I love having my children and my family.

I've worked with farmers in Zimbabwe who've lost their lands. I've worked with people in Venezuela, under threat of kidnappings, whose external world is unstable. But they have very strong social connections with their family and friends. And as a result, they're able to maintain a greater level of happiness and optimism than I've seen from bankers, consultants, or salespeople who are on the road all the time, who follow jobs separated from their families, and, as a result, find themselves missing out on the happiness that comes from those very connections that they severed.

You're giving up. You're slipping into being miserable and if you are being miserable, then it's all about you again. But it's not all about you. Love doesn't work that way.

I have some pretty wonderful friendships, so that's been really good for me. In the past year, I've really worked on that. I think when I was married, I let my friendships go. I think people thought, "Oh, because she's married now, she's so happy all the time." But I really was just isolated in my house.

Everybody has bad relationships and, at the end of the day, they are just a great way to set yourself up for a good relationship.

I'm a person who's been in a long-term relationship. It's not surprising that a lot of my friends - whether they're in same-sex relationships or not, whether they're married officially or just in a long-term relationship - have really interesting and various stages in their relationship. My life is looking at these friendships and saying, "Wait a minute, isn't this something really interesting? How can I explore this?"

You know, I started out really hot out of the box. Then I've definitely had and up-and-down career. And when things started cooling off again, it frustrated me.

Nothing's perfect along the way [in life], and you ride the ups and downs. It's how you come out of those and continue on that I guess really matters.

You've got to go down in order to feel better about yourself when you come up.

If there's anything you're not happy about-in your relationships, in your health, in your career-make a decision right now about how you're going to change it immediately.

I might have had too many friends in my twenties. I probably said yes too much, and then I had to learn how to say no. How to get away in order to work on stuff.

There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you: the worst day of your life wasn't in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn't in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Now I'm taking some classes, I'm going to school for film, and I think I'm going to end up back in the industry in one capacity or another. I'm not sure where just yet. I kind of stepped away from it for a few years. I thought I was done with it. But I grew up in it. It's such a big part of my life.

That's the way to live - around people who care. It may be a tough ride, but something is going to come out of it.

Very seldom will a person give up on himself. He continues to have hope because he knows he has the potential for change. He tries again - not just to exist, but to bring about those changes in himself that will make life worth living. Yet people are very quick to give up on friends, and especially on their spouses, to declare them hopeless, and to either walk away or do nothing more than resign themselves to a bad situation.

Never blame anyone in your life. Good people give you happiness. Bad people give you experience. Worst people give you a lesson. And best people give you memories.

If you look at the actual movies that I've done, the whole struggle is to get to that point, so it's not something that you just have so easy . . . But it's okay. It doesn't bother me. I've done okay so far.

You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.

There’s always going to be ups and downs in life and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel the pain. Pain is good. It makes you stronger in time. You will realize how great the ‘great’ really is. Life is about ups and downs. You just have to be able to ride the waves.

Part of the reason why some of the relationships I've had in my past worked for so long is because when you're making movies, a huge gap of time can pass when you don't even see the person.