Zoe Kravitz Quotes

People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.

I try to define myself through my own choices rather than just accepting society's kind of you're that, you're that, let me put you in a box kind of thing.

Nobody likes being told who or what they are.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

Stuffing people into boxes is for those who have issues about their own box.

I wanted to seem completely invisible but whenever you're saying someone else's words and relaying the story of someone else's life, it's not you.

It's been helpful to have so many opportunities to look different so people stop pigeonholing you.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

There is a great suspicion of saying that anyone, especially a child, is 'the product of destiny,' or 'formed by fate,' or 'predestined for a certain life.' I am suspicious, too, of efforts to cage children or adults in preconceived ideas of who they are or should be.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

Don't classify me, read me.

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

I think there's a lot of pressure on young people to really be the thing that everyone is telling them that they are, opposed to discovering it for themselves.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

You can ask me about my beliefs on things; that's cool. But I think to lump in and say, You follow this person, so then, wow, who are you?' Ask me who I am.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

If you live the way others want you to, you are called a nice guy. If you live the way you want, you are called selfish.

When I just decided to be myself, that's when you get questions like, 'How do you feel about feminism?' And I have no idea; this is just when I decide what I'm not tolerating and what I genuinely think and a little bit in between.

To force something that was not organic to who I am was tough on me, and so I can relate to all those girls and guys out there going through the same thing.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.