Cress Williams Quotes

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

I come from a family of scholars who got their Master's degrees. To my grandma - and to a lot of people - an education was a way of making it out of the worst parts of their life.

My elder brother is a lecturer in a college in Haryana, and my eldest sister was a teacher. I feel they are more educated than I am. I, too, used to dream of becoming a teacher.

When I left Stockton and went to Stanford, I felt I hit the lotto. I did not think I was coming back.

I went to Cambridge University and was the first in my family to graduate.

I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and I'm an immigrant. My aspirations coming out of college weren't particularly lofty. I wanted a good job with a good company.

My father was an academic, an eccentric. He was a lecturer.

No one in my family had ever even gone to college.

My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I'd have gone if he hadn't. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.

I wanted to go to medical school. But, I never got a college scholarship.

I was the first person to go to university from my family.

I didn't really know I wanted to act when I was a child. I have a lot of interests, and I really wanted to finish my education - go to college - and didn't really want to have a career as an adolescent.

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, 'I want to get out and become like him'. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

There are thousands of inspirational stories waiting to be told about young women who yearn for a great education. They are stories of struggle and stories of success, and they will inspire others to take action and work to change lives.

I was in school, but I wasn't into school. I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing in school, which was film studies. That was what I intended on doing, but I didn't go away to a university because I wanted to stay in L.A. and audition while I took classes, so I elected to go to a community college and just take G.E. courses. It was terrible.

I think if I hadn't been a writer, I'd have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn't going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!

The dream of my family was for me to be an educated person.

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.

That attitude that I wouldn't succeed didn't come from my family; it came from school and then the township we lived in. I wasn't going to settle for that, and my mother warned us not to settle for less, to make the most of our lives.

A little bit about my family: We didn't really come from much, and we didn't take family trips to California, so my first trip to California was actually my first day of school.

I look at the kids coming out of Yale. They are so intelligent with their careers. I wish I had that.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

Dreams do come true, even for someone who couldn't speak English and never had a music lesson or much of an education.

I was the first and only person in my family to go to university, and I spent two decades redesigning myself: even my voice is the product of elocution lessons.