Gugu Mbatha-Raw Quotes

People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.

Whether it’s your taste in clothing, your needs in a relationship, or what you do for a living—don’t let anyone else be at the controls. Define yourself.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.

That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

I've always done everything at my disposal to avoid labeling what I do, or to avoid being labeled myself.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

You call yourself what you want to call yourself.

I've tried actively to define myself and redefine myself, and not be pigeonholed.

I don't want to be identified by any one role I do.

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

People have certain ideas of what they think you should be, and I have fought that categorisation my whole life.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

I don't want to be someone else.

As a southern woman, we often define ourselves by who we are with. But I wanted my life to be built differently.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

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.

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Never let anyone define you. You are the only person who defines you. No one can speak for you. Only you speak for you. You are your only voice.

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.