Trying Quotes - Page 296

There's a lot of negativity in the world. I'm trying to be positive.

Sometimes people ask what it was like when I got to meet Mick Jagger, and I must admit that you just try and chill out and be your best self around anyone that you meet.

My narrative is that I've never known what's coming next-I still don't. I fell down the right set of stairs and have been surrounded by people who have picked me up and said, “Let's try this again.” It's been one anxious block of uncertainty after another.

Sometimes in the past when I was going to perform a piece again I would listen to old recordings and try to reproduce the material. This time I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn't work.

I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

Today, I will let go. I will stop trying to control everything. I will stop trying to make myself be and do better, and I will let myself be.

Pretty much everyone I know, no matter what size, is trying some system. Even when someone gets to looking like she should be so proud of herself, instead she's like, 'I could be another three pounds less; I could be a little taller and have bigger lips.' Where does it end? You just have to say, 'It's pretty damn good. I am right here at the moment and I'm OK with it. I've got other things to think about.'

I've always said that kids should enhance your life, not hinder your life, so I just try to make the most out of being with my kids. You have to have a life for yourself somewhere in the mix of being a wife and mum.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

Girls often feel very powerless in their lives and their families, and they kind of mimic the male violence as a way to try and get some of that male power that they see lacking in their own lives.

If the door has been opened and I've been invited, or if I'm not invited and I somehow know I'm supposed to go in there, I put myself together and go in, praying all the while. I try to learn something before I go in. I try to show some respect of the place I'm going into.

It's hard because people think they have something to lose and the truth is they have everything to gain in trying to love somebody.

If somebody is really trying to take your head off with a baseball bat - I don't know how long you're supposed to stand there and turn the other cheek, so he or she can get a better angle at taking your head off.

I think that that's the wisest thing - to prevent illness before we try to cure something.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

Let the conversation flow at its own pace, don't try to rush it or control it. You need to let go and be part of the conversation.

One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

I don't think I've got enough energy to be competitive! Most of my energy is just devoted to me being nervous and trying to deal with the situation.

I'm just trying to portray what I find ironic or humorous.

Well, I'm still looking for Maurice Ashley. My essential qualities. I think that more than anything, I try to do the right thing, I think about doing the right thing.

I don't want to pretend like I'm clairvoyant or anything, but I had a tremendous sense of malaise about our political future. This is right around the millennium, right around 1999, when I wrote it. The Sopranos certainly reflected that; when I saw that on the air, I was like "Oh my God, I'm not alone." But it doesn't seem that the culture really caught up with that. George W. Bush won two elections... I'm not even trying to say this from a political standpoint. I think there is a resonance to the kind of glory of that period, and the foreboding of what happened.

There's a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What's the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it's exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That's really cool. That's the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

I'm obsessed with trying to understand what somebody is talking about and trying to get them to understand me.

It's a good idea to pay attention to the world and try to understand how it works rather than how you would like it to work.