Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje Quotes

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

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

Pippin chooses love and finds a greater sense of himself at the end of all the madness. I relate to him in many ways. I have been through stuff, thought I knew best, and often been proven wrong.

A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

Whatever your ethnicity is, in this life you are going to be on a journey to discover who you are and how you feel about yourself.

I've been things and seen places.

History … liberated me from a past that was no longer relevant. I was ready to explore the American side of my hyphenated psyche. I'm still doing it

My continent knows more about me than I do myself.

In life, there's a ladder sometimes, and maybe at the top, there's a mirror. You take a step up, then maybe three steps down... just because you don't want to face the decloaking in the mirror.

I've learned a lot in life, travelling, living abroad, just in the school of life.

And the most important thing isn't the trophies, it's the experiences, what you lived, what's here in your heart, what you know, what you live. No one can ever steal that from you.

We're all reflections of the lives we lead.

I just didn't really know who I was, so I didn't really know what I sounded like. And so I did a lot of writing, and I studied abroad, and I fell in love, and, like... I got to be like any other college student.

I think nowadays it's very important to re-connect with ourselves and our roots.

[Shwing] the really naked stuff I've dealt with in my own life, my own therapy and relationships - for me it just feels like a film I'm really proud of.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.

Now you see how you are, the wisdom mixed in with all the scars.

Wounds make better lessons than lectures.

I haven't left a mark on the world, but is that so bad? Considering how deeply the world has marked me?

I look at a stream and I see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day, disappear - flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.