Douglas Kennedy Quotes

There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids.

I love my parents very much, but people either continue or break the patterns of what their life should be and I just want to completely break whatever patterns would lead me to the same life choices that they made.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

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.

Hopefully the new breed of kids won't have to go through that hard lesson - my kids, my grandkids, my fans' kids, hopefully they won't have to go through it.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

I think you are a product of the environment you surround yourself in, and everything you've experienced is a part of you and the fabric you are in.

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.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

I would certainly say that my life, and perhaps human life in general, follows an intricate pattern of defining, declaring, struggling for, fighting for what we think of and treasure as the self. The inviolate self. This begins with our families: your parents are part of your cultural landscape, and they are also shaped by larger forces than them.

My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.

Everyone is a product of their own environment, and that, I think, has actually been the key lesson for me.

Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

I am everything I am today, because of my past.

We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells uswhat we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says--Work; and to us it says--Seem! To you it says--As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says--Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.

Until you are willing to accept total and complete responsibility for every aspect of your life, your life will keep sending you experiences designed to get your attention.

Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.

Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.