Deanna Raybourn Quotes

My 20s were a time where I made it; my 30s were when I was away, confused, and trying to figure it all out.

I kind of see myself as a cartoon that's on its way to becoming a real person that has to find that special amulet or mushroom to get to that next realm or level. I don't feel like anything is that tangible. It freaks me out, why I feel unhappy or conflicted and why that can change on a dime.

I would stay in my room for days, for days at times, just trying to get it together, to know what my next phase was going to be.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

During Breaking The Waves, I was on my own in a hotel room. I think I would have been impossible to live with. When you go home, you have to pretend to be the person you are at home.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.

He longed to be lost but he couldn't bear not to be found.

I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident. I kind of feel in between now.

Getting to a place of comfort can be uncomfortable.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

The mid-life crisis is just those times when you're not so into the things you were when you were younger.

By the time I went to Yale, I'd been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless - and a little bored - and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.

Sometimes I feel 15; other times, I feel fully grown and mature and handling all my business. It can waver from day to day, hour to hour.

Without a musket to raise, a barricade to storm, a flag to wave, the question hit me in the face like the cold air: 'Who am I?'

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.

I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.

I felt that I had been influenced by being in the city enough and I wanted to go off by myself to see what was going on. I remember going out there and looking in the mirror and thinking I wasn't anything.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.