Patrick deWitt Quotes

Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited.

The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.

The thing is, I moved tons. I was in like nine schools by ninth grade, so I moved a ton of times when I was younger. As hard as that was growing up, it helped me in so many ways being an actress, because every year I was constantly changing who I was. I could be someone new. I wouldn't care if people judged me or didn't like me because, in the end, I knew I was probably going to move in a few months anyway.

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them.

I do believe we're all adaptable, and you're probably more adaptable than you realize.

It's interesting when you've been a partner with someone for so long. So now to sing solo and starting all over again I am learning that I am more bodacious than I thought. I don't know where it's coming from but I am glad.

But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere.

If I learned anything from Betty coming into my life, it's to just be open to all the things that come along.

I think anyone taken out of their comfort zone and put somewhere else will change.

I have enormous respect for the human being because they're asked to take on a lot. And I don't think there's any easy solution. But I think the journey is what you have to finally be satisfied with, but not be afraid of the lessons one has to learn... it ends up as grace. And you grow; you find a way to continue.

There has been a lot of movement in my family, but in a way, it has been great. It has made me adaptable. I can plonk myself anywhere.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

Yes, I had to learn how to live life outside, but I had so many people help me.

There is a cost that comes with moving schools so often and it's not what I want for my son when he gets older, but it did make me very adaptable. I became aware of what was missing from the social structure of each class that I arrived in, and made sure to fill that gap.

I am restless. I don't mind leaving this comfortable, static life. I could live a year on my own in a remote village.

I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.

I'm a Navy brat. You find that a lot of stage actors are Army or Navy brats, because they have the ability to make a big impression, make friends, and then leave just a few months later.

I grew up moving around. I went to seven different schools, so I know what it's like to be that new girl and have to not only know who you are but also take that into foreign circumstances and know how to respond.

I used to play football all the time. In the U.S., people don't play football, so I had to learn basketball. Looking back, that's what I like about my life - doing new things, having a new perspective.

I've been fortunate in that I've been forced to move from zone to zone.

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

For people who have... had curve balls thrown at them, it is easier to digest change and digest change in other people. Change only scares the small-minded. The small-minded and me.

When you do what I've done - the normal Hollywood way, where you let people do things for you - and then you make certain choices where you have to learn to do it for yourself, which is how you should do it, it caused me to get way behind in stuff. I wouldn't change a thing because it's been a very important learning thing.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.