Zawe Ashton Quotes

When it's a really dark emotional scene, you have to make the effort to shake it off, at the end of the day, before you go home to your kids and try to be a normal human being. You definitely want to make that effort to shake it off.

There's a different expectation, not just on mothers but on women. We're expected to do it all, to have it all, and look good through the process and have a smile on our face, and that's not always the case.

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

I was very strongly influenced by women's magazines and I really believed tha a woman could not be married and raise a family and have a successful career all at the same time.

To me, I don't write when I'm depressed. If I'm depressed, which is actually rare, I'm not doing anything, you know, and I'm not able to do anything.

Being a person is really hard, obviously depending on your background for some people it can be much harder, but mental health and how we feel about ourselves is so key to changing the world in a positive way.

I think there's strength in being honest and open about yourself and your struggles. But it can also be a challenge. This is my life, I live with my own mental health, and that is happening to me every day. I can talk about it from a position of 'Oh, I've done this' but I'm still living that existence.

I was very depressed at a young age and felt like I didn't have agency towards that. Being 'female' meant I couldn't be that - I couldn't be angry, loud, sullen. Being sad meant I was weak.

We have to acknowledge that it goes both ways and that there's many social factors which will impact negatively, as well as positively, on mental health.

I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'

Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a 'good woman.' The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing domestic goddess.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

At the end of the day, no one asks a woman, 'Do you need a neck rub? Do you need a drink, honey?'

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

'Single' is usually applied to women as though they are a problem to be fixed.

I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

You know, the genders are different in how they approach things, and so I really think that women put a lot more guilt on themselves than need be.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

Everyone says to you, 'if you play Ophelia, you'll end up crazy,' but we're all somewhere on the spectrum of mental health, and I think that if you approach it that way it's not such an intimidating issue.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

You can never turn the clock back and, since we're talking about mental health, I would stress that.

When you're a girl, you have to be everything, You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet, and you have to be sexy, and you have to be this and you have to be that and you have to be nice, and you have to - it's like, I can't be all of those things at once. I'm a human being.

The pressure to keep up with what society tells us is perfect is causing us to enter a time when women are no longer women, but plastic shells of what women used to be.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didn't get you very far, because there weren't too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldn't be both.