Mara Brock Akil Quotes

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

You can play women who have a face on or who zip something up, but you have to dig deeper to actually find the humanity and real aspects.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

I also have a different, softer side, and I want for people to hear that.

At the end of the day, you have to find the humanity in you in each character.

The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?

I feel there's something about becoming a character that helps people understand themselves.

We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don't have that, it's not worth doing, frankly.

Being in relationship with others helps us know ourselves better.

To me, acting used to be just, 'Get my face out there, get girls, make a little bit of money, make my mom proud.' It was just like sports. But there were moments in 'Moonlight' that I really felt like I had to know why he is the way he is. Or just people in general - why this person walks around with a frown on their face instead of a smile.

When you start to find balance, then you start to ask more important questions, like, 'Who am I really?' That's when you start seeing that every single person around you is a human being just doing the best that they can.

'Citylights' is for those people who know a lot but don't feel at all. It's time for them to feel, and this film will make those people, who know so much, feel because feeling is the life blood of human race, which is disappearing.

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

They say: 'If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.' I say: 'If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.

I'm into people's emotional lives and relationships and the complications of living. That's my turf.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

I always try to find some part of a character that exists in me and plug that in.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.