Jenny Downham Quotes

Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

I used to be called Waddy Jones. But I changed my name to Ninja because it's more me.

Not to get too deep on shaving my mustache, but it was kind of symbolic of, 'This is a moment of liberation, a chance to reinvent yourself.' That's kind of what I did.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

I just decided I wanted to become someone else... So I became someone else.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

I always wished I could move around and switch schools. It was hard to have these radical transformations. You'd think, 'I will be a totally different person tomorrow,' but it never worked.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

I've been starting in new places year after year after year. It's just like when I went to Greece or the Philippines. I love when people think I'm a new artist. It's a chance to start over.

I changed my name when I was 13. I don't know why but it made sense at the time. I wanted another identity. I wanted to reinvent myself.

I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.

It's interesting how there are a few times in your life when you get to reinvent yourself. Like the beginning of junior high or high school, and certainly when you go off to college.

The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.

Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.

Everything has changed for me since I've changed my name. It's one thing to be called Prince but it's better to actually be one. I have such a reverence for life.

Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

I peeled off La Brea and went home and instantly made a reservation to come back to New York. Essentially, I fired everybody that was in my life, my agent, my lawyer, my manager, my girlfriend and came back to New York.

I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again - -I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter.

All I want is to become someone new. In this case, Tobias Johnson, son of Evelyn Johnson. Tobias Johnson may have lived a dull and empty life, but he is at least a whole person, not this fragment of a person that I am, too damaged by pain to become anything useful.

In a way, I was born twice. I was born in 1934 and again in 1955 when I came to Pittsburgh. I am thankful to say that I lived two lives.

I couldn't wait to come to New York to reinvent myself.

Something had changed in me, even if I didn't know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time.