Jennifer Jason Leigh Quotes

Your family is unavoidable. You cannot escape them or trade them in for another family. You also can't change them... but you can change your response to them.

I'm a middle child, and I'm pretty diplomatic: the peace-maker.

It's good that I put my personal ego aside. My basketball ego was, 'Why we negotiating?' But my personal ego didn't take it personal. I put my personal ego aside a little bit.

I'm a middle child, so I have middle-child syndrome. With a middle child, you always have to take in everything and adjust and maybe compromise a little bit so you're able to see both sides of an issue. I'm also a Leo - I love astrology - so that affected me, just being a lion.

I like to keep everyone happy. I feel like it's my responsibility to do that.

Every relationship you have, you're learning and growing and taking something from that.

Dr. Phil was very helpful and caring. I believe he helped all of us there and watching how to better relate, understand, and communicate with our families and loved ones. Dr. Phil recommended reading my new book.

My mom always said fighting with me as a kid was like going to court. I'm trying to realize that being right is not the most important thing.

I was a middle child. I grew up in Brooklyn with three sisters and a brother. You know what that means: everybody is constantly fighting with everybody and you are in the middle of the storm trying to make peace. That is your life. Making everybody work and play well together.

I was the middle of five children, and we were five very opinionated siblings. That probably pushed me to learn to speak up for myself.

I'm just learning who I am and how relationships work and how to make them function. No different from anyone else.

I have a lot of guy-like quintessential relationship qualities that I have had to work on.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me. I've talked to a therapist,; I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is that I'm a Sagittarius. Please don't make me reveal more than that. It's tough enough as it is.

A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.

Soha is a very balanced and intelligent girl. She does advise me at times. We do discuss films but the decision rests with the individual. We are both strong characters and so at times our fights turn volatile. But me being a Gemini, I blow hot and cold, so I usually patch up in 10 minutes.

I really grew up more of a people pleaser and I just wanted to make people happy, and maybe didn't always say exactly how I was feeling.

I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.

I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.

I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.

I'm a private person by nature. I live in my brain half the time, not the world, and I'm not a natural negotiator. But I've learned to negotiate.

Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of evry part of your life.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

After years of doing it, you learn the difference between your ego and your opinion. When you're married you have to cut through that.

We're not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.