Quotes About Self-discovery

At Morehouse, I found myself and my voice, and I didn't want to lose that at Yale.

After my final semester at Yale in December of 2013, I made a scary choice. Instead of looking for work - feeling over-read and underweight - that for a few months I would go wherever the wind carried me. I would become a student of the world, and I would eat.

I was in Puerto Rico going to school, and it was very jarring for me. 'Traumatic' is the only way that I can say it. Kids were making fun of me: 'Oh, you're a Yankee.' And I acted out a lot. A lot. But looking back, and through a little bit of therapy, everything I am has to do with that time.

I just felt like reflecting on my junior year, when I didn't know what I was doing, I left a lot of stuff out there. Actually, I gained close to 700 yards more and I took myself out of a lot of games.

I was in 'Seussical,' and I was in a cage onstage in a purple yarn suit singing backup, and I was like: 'I've had it. I can't do this anymore.' I will say for the record that I did love the show, but I was like: 'I want to do something else. I need a little more.'

When you go to college you can just be whoever you wanna be. So I got there and I'm like, Yeah, I'ma rapper.

I lost my mind at 15. I'd been shown a world where there were no boundaries, where everyone gave me all the power. And I was like, 'This is great!' Then that was gone. But I was like, 'Yeah, but I still want that.' I'd lost my humble, very quiet, introverted sensibilities which I think I definitely had as a kid.

A lot of people refer to young Diana as sweet and shy, and yeah, a lot of us are when we're 18 or whatever.

Yeah, it is, because it's a real discovery of your inner resources, you know. That's what my character is all about and what my playing is all about. But to get up there and just go inside and draw out something that makes you feel good first and foremost.

I finally realized that yeah I did want to be an actor and it wasn't out of habit, but I needed to grow up for myself and then kind of re-enter the industry with a sound understanding of what my sensibilities and my values are as a relatively formed human being.

There were some super-lean years, yeah. I'm six feet four. And I entered into this period all of a sudden when I was too big to play a kid and I was too young to play an adult. Like, I couldn't play the lawyer, but I couldn't play the high school kid anymore.

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

Yeah, to me, acting is very therapeutic. I get out a lot of anger and frustration.

I consider my relationship with acting in Hollywood as sort of a mutual breakup. Through puberty, Hollywood didn't really want me anymore, and I was like, 'Yeah, I don't really want you, either.'

I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.

I think it was at 16 when I forced myself because my dad had nagged me for an entire year. Like, 'Come on, sing for people. You have a nice voice,' and I just wouldn't do it. One evening, I just decided, 'Screw it, I'll do it.' I remember it was really bad. But I did it. So that was good.

I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,000 a year.

If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am.

New Year's Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change.

Everyone in my family went to college. So I went for a year to appease people, in a way. I didn't really see that being my path, but I did want to be sure, as well, about that. When I was, that's when I left.

I didn't figure out the makeup or cute hair or clothes until oh, maybe my junior year of high school.

After Year 12, I went to Vancouver for my gap year and met an agent who told me to lose 25 kg.

When I was 13, before I got in high school, I was writing mad raps. I didn't really know if it was good or not, so for a year, I just held them. When I got in high school, I started spittin' bars.

I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.