Margo Jefferson Quotes

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

National identity is something that's directly connected to our personal experiences and the decisions we make, the roads we decide to take at certain points in our life.

I stay close to my identity - that's something I find important - but I don't completely shut myself off from the outside world.

I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I'd made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.

Carving out an identity for yourself is important so I'm trying to do that as well.

I hated the idea that I would be like my father. Which is one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to be a writer and wanted to be an actor instead. I wanted to go in a total different direction. But, of course, I ended up being a writer anyway.

I want to be defined by my own essence.

I try not to define myself. Other people are going to do that for you anyway.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

One creates oneself.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

You either become like your parents or you become the opposite of your parents. And I like to think that I'm the opposite of my parents.

It's hard to live in a blind and aimless - or dishonest, rather - narrative when somebody in your family is going farther toward - or at least think they are and say they are - their true self.

I think, for me, it has been important to remain 'Petra from Fulnek.'

I am my own person with my own experiences, personality, and definition of success.

I've got the fighting Irish, and Puerto Ricans are some of the best fighters in the world. I'm proud of who I am, but it doesn't define me as a person.

I'm a product of the different - whether it be institutional racialism, whether it might be growing up in a low-income area, whether it might be, you know, coming from my mother, my father. I'm a totally different person from my mother and father, but once again I'm from them. We all have our different souls, but I'm from them.

As you get older, you realise that your identity becomes more important - the environment in which you have grown is actually part of who you are just as much as your family or your school.

I love tennis. But even if I become the greatest of all time, I still don't only want to be defined by tennis. I'm my own person. And I want to be remembered as I really am.

People often ask me when I realised that I was different. Some people seem surprised that it's a question that I cannot answer. I was never told that I was different. I was always just Sinead; I was just like my dad.

My faith - as well as my Nigerian culture - really gave me the substance and foundation to be who I desire to be in life.