Joe Orton Quotes

I wanted to wash off the experience of Africa but obviously I couldn't because that's who I was.

Puberty is an extremely traumatic process even if you don't realize it. It kind of lives with you for like 10 years.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

Rock 'n' roll says, 'Hey, man, this is where you can be normal,' and then after a while you grow up and you go, 'Wait a minute. Oh, by the way, I learned how to do these cool things, but I never learned how to speak my mind. I never learned how to express myself emotionally. I should have been paying attention more.'

The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.

It was only when I got to 21 that my personality started coming out a little bit more.

I feel that where I came from made me the actor that I am, and I wouldn't want to trade that with anything else.

I didn't know what a boy was until I was about 18. I wasn't in the cool group at all. We weren't cool, but we weren't nerdy enough to be picked on. So we were just in our own little bubble.

I was quite a different child, I felt isolated. In time, that level of being with yourself crystallises who you are, and you can see what other people are without being blinded by what they want from you.

I feel like we're always learning about ourselves, but at twelve, you're learning big things that shape your identity.

I was very immature - who isn't at age 12? Let's be real. Once I kind of figured myself out and grew as a person, I now have a ton of different friends and learned who I was.

Yeah, my parents exposed me to horror movies when I was like 6 or 7. I mean exposed me in a good way, they didn't mean any harm.

I'm just gonna be who I am, who God made me, what my mom taught me to be.

I didn't have boundaries when I was growing up. I knew the difference between right and wrong, and all the things a kid needs to know, but nobody ever said to me, 'You can't do that, because that's not what girls are supposed to do. That's more of a boy thing.'

It took me a while to learn how to spell my own name.

High school is really when I came into my own.

Being in your 30s is about discovering yourself and your body and enjoying who you are.

Like many kids, I wanted to do my own thing so it wasn't until around the end of high school and start of college that I started to develop my own faith.

I don't think naturally I tend toward anything that's really distinctly branded as adult. I feel like I sort of write for myself as I would've been at 12 or 13 years old.

I mean my mother always wanted us to be individuals. She always instilled that into our brains which was incredibly painful for an adolescent to deal with.

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person's heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.