Francisco Costa Quotes

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

I was so sheltered as a kid that when I went to college, it was like taking the chains off. That's where the trouble came from. It was the first time for me being by myself, and I got into everything you could think of.

It was a big step for me in the Netherlands: to leave home at the age of 18.

At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed, and I became a massage therapist. With this job, all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent, and completely in control of my life.

In S Club I played a role in a band, but now I can go off and be me - My horizon's wide open now. It's scary and it's daunting, but it's an absolute thrill. I feel brand new!

I think I went through my phase of feeling sort of invisible when I left my small hometown in Canada and moved to the big city of Vancouver. I kind of had to decide right there in that moment what I was going to do with the rest of my life and make a thousand decisions after finishing high school. Fortunately, I chose acting.

I was scouted when I was, like, sixteen, and I hated it. I wasn't ready to work. When I turned 19, I decided to move to Paris to pursue modeling for myself there. It was kind of a way to get out of the house and discover something for myself, in a way.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.

My earliest memory of freedom was when I was about 14 and I stopped caring what people thought about me! I was so free and in charge! That whole year I was exploring myself, and I was so 'free' that I got sent away to boarding school.

The staging for 'Monsters' is all about me getting free. In the beginning I'm like tied, in a dark place... until I am scared no more, and I'm taking the lead of my life, I'm being the queen of my life, I'm ruling the world! In the end I'm taking a risk, but I'm taking the leap of faith.

I think that New York liberated me in the sense that I moved here when I was 18, so it was a fresh perspective on life. I had been living in L.A. my whole life and I had never lived anywhere else, so being away from family and really making a name for myself was huge for me.

I had no direction. But now I can afford to have no direction.

I broke out of my shell once I graduated from high school and got into college in my first year.

It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

I got a few marriage proposals in my 20s. I just wasn't ready. I just knew if I committed, I would've wound up doing something wrong, messing it up. I still felt like I had some living to do.

It's important to me to try and expose young people to the things they believe are off-limits to them. I tell them, 'There are no walls, only the ones we put up.' My advice to young people looking at my life is not to follow my footprint but to go out there and make their own.

I'm spreading my wings at last.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was about 20, all by myself. It was exciting. I had this moment when I felt like I needed to put on my big-boy pants and just make that leap to see what would happen.

After high school, I had $2,000 saved, and I packed everything I could into my '95 Nissan Sentra with no air-conditioning, and I drove out to L.A.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?