Dorothy Allison Quotes

There's a reason why she left them, Lauren," he says. His voice is deep, and it rumbles. "What's your name?" "Um..." I don't know why I hesitate. But "Beatrice" just doesn't sound right anymore. "Think about it," he says, a faint smile curling his lips. " You don't get to pick again." A new place, a new name. I can be remade here. "Tris," I say firmly.

I actually envy actors who have a persona: 'This is the way I am. This is the part I play.' And do it over and over and over. To me, that's a lot easier than trying to reinvent yourself every six months.

I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself.

When I left for college, I told myself that this was a chance for reinvention. No one on the other side of the country knew that I was an introvert, so maybe if I tried not acting like an introvert, I wouldn't be one.

You got to make the most of your second life. I was born Nayvadius, but now I'm Future. Should I dwell on what Nayvadius was supposed to be? I get a chance to experience life as something else. I wasn't supposed to be like this.

'Await Your Reply' by Dan Chaon. I've always been obsessed with the idea of disappearing and becoming someone else. Even if you don't share that obsession, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.

Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.

I got here when I was 12, I found out I was undocumented when I was 16, I became a journalist when I was 17, and all I ever did was write other stories to run away from myself.

I never in a million years thought I would be starring in Hairspray, ever. Because if you think about my past, it's been 30 years of playing a macho leading man, so when I was offered it, I said: "Why? Why me? What have I done to deserve that you think I should do this?" After much convincing, over a year and two months, I was convinced they wanted to make a great movie.

Whoever I had become had to die.

I am looking forward to getting out of the bubble. I am glad that I'm leaving this place at a relatively young age, at 55. So I have the opportunity for a second maybe even a third act in a way that I think would be tougher if I were, you know, the age of some presidents when they left.

One can run away from anything but oneself.

All I want is to become someone new. In this case, Tobias Johnson, son of Evelyn Johnson. Tobias Johnson may have lived a dull and empty life, but he is at least a whole person, not this fragment of a person that I am, too damaged by pain to become anything useful.

I think a lot of people want to, at some point in their life, be someone else, run away and escape, in some way. We actors do get to do it. We have a job that allows for that. We have an outlet for it.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.

Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

Leaving high school. It's sad and you're going to miss all your friends. You're going to miss your life and you've been doing that for the past four years, and it's comfortable. But now, there's something possibly bigger on the horizon, just new and fresh and exciting. I think we all kind of felt like that.

I think I’ve developed this pattern of running away when it comes time to fall in love and stay in a relationship.

I'm not much like myself any more.

If you're spending your entire early 20s chasing the next party, what are you running away from?

When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.

I think you’re never the same person when you close a book as when you open one; it changes your life very subtly.