Renee O'Connor Quotes

The value of travel is not just the travel but what the travel makes of you.

My feeling about seeing the world is that it's going to change you necessarily, just the very fact of being out there and meeting people from different cultures and different ways of life.

Almost any film that you do is an opportunity to open you up and make you more aware of an area that you might not be thinking about. That's what is kind of cool, or one of the cool things about this profession.

The time for me in the Peace Corps was easily the most formative experience I've had in my life.

I got a whole different mindset from living in Senegal and being there. I learned a lot of things, met a lot of people, and got to really find out what I wanted to work for and who I want to be and who I want to help and who I'm doing it for.

I think young people ought to seek the experience that is going to knock them off center.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

The sisters and brothers that you meet give you the materials which your character uses to build itself. It is said that some people are born great, others achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. In truth, the ways in which your character is built have to do with all three of those. Those around you, those you choose, and those who choose you.

I had to introduce a lot of people into my writing environment which I thought at first I would find really difficult, but I actually found that I loved it. It meant that I was meeting different people; it meant that I was expressing myself in different ways.

travel is compost for the mind

One of the gifts of being an actor is that you get to learn new things see the world through different eyes.

The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.

That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

I think traveling made me who I am. When I was 16, I was an exchange student in England, and that was the year that I kind of feel like I was on the road going one direction in life, and it just kind of shifted me over, and I finished high school, and I went traveling for three more years instead of going to college.

College inspired me to think differently. It's like no other time in your life.

In life, there is always that special person who shapes who you are, who helps to determine the person you become.

'South Pacific' - I really learned a lot. I swear I like to say that during 'South Pacific,' I went from being a girl to being a woman.

When you get to experience something that is outside of your reality, it changes you.

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education.

And then a great thing in my life was going to India.

Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.

When we moved to Europe when I was a teenager, I really did not want to go. I was happy in my school, with my friends, but looking back on it, it was the best experience I've ever had. We traveled every weekend. I experienced incredible new cultures, museums, cities, and it really opened up my eyes.

You're really lucky as an artist if you get a role that changes you as a person.