Cicely Tyson Quotes

You always seek to control others when you are not in full ownership of yourself.

Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

To soar toward what's possible, you must leave behind what's comfortable.

I am not a quitter. I will fight until I drop. It is just a matter of having some faith in the fact that as long as you are able to draw breath in the universe, you have a chance.” Happy 94th birthday to the regal and ever-resilient Cicely Tyson, an actress for the ages!

Healing, as I see it, is not the absence of pain. Rather it is a gradual reduction in the ache. The lessening of that hurt eventually makes room for fond memories to surface.

When you don't know your true value, you see the world through the lens of how you don't measure up.

What’s for you in this life, you will get. And what is not for you, you will never get. Do you hear me?

When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul.

Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew. They're what make the instrument stretch, what make you go beyond the norm.

As life has taught me time and again, you often have to lose your present circumstance to make room for your forthcoming one.

Anger would've been the justified response, and for a time in private, I was certainly apoplectic. But as life has taught me more than once, resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it.

That is, in this life, who we are for one another--fellow sojourners and witnesses. We are here to see and hear one another.

We may never realize the extent to which our behaviors impact our children, how they seek validation in our every word and smile, gaze and gesture.

…when parents think they're protecting their children by withholding the truth. They are in fact exposing them to heartache.

Embedded in this woman’s observation was an assumption that lives at the center of all bias: You are not like me. You are intrinsically different. And that difference deems you inferior.

Over and over in our world, we have witnessed how today's riches can become tomorrow's scarcity. We'd do well to heed the lesson. In times of plenty, paucity sits by, licking its lips and awaiting its next grand appearance.

I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.

You don't have to be touched to be emotionally robbed.

When you give yourself away, when you surrender yourself as a divine vessel, … you impact lives eternally.

...resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it.

To be seen in this life, truly observed without judgment, is what it feels like to be loved.

Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.

The most potent antidote to reticence is survival.

Nearly all parents I know can sum up their aspirations for their children in one word: better.

Turning a blind eye to our history has not saved us from its consequences.

But when the people who gave you life have departed this earth, you enter a strange new corridor of detachment. You are untethered, disconnected from the two story lines that gave birth to your one.

She does her hair in an Afro like Cicely Tyson, that famous actress I seen on TV once, or Angela Davis, who I don’t know exactly who she is but they say she’s got guts and ain’t scared of white people.

America has our blood on its palms, our flesh between its teeth. When you come to understand what we have endured, when you let the barefaced savagery of it all truly penetrate, you are forever haunted by the horror.

We each have many faces, various ways of appearing and behaving. In one moment, we may show remarkable steadfastness, and in another, an aching vulnerability. We can be at turns tranquil and belligerent, jubilant and despairing. We are inherently multifaceted and yet marvelously complete.

God is the Master of the unlikely.

I’m grateful that God often laughs at our plans and substitutes his better ones.

if you expect nothing, you will never be disappointed.

Why wouldn’t I be working? The alternative is to sit around making butt prints.

Just walking through this life as a Black person, and actually surviving that, was and still is an ovation-worthy performance.

That's the power of education. It expands one's field of vision, and in so doing, it lifts entire families and communities.

…this life doesn't simply come with its share of unpredictability; surprise it its most conspicuous feature.

Our feet tell our stories. They carry us through this life, moving us from one sorrow and season to the next. Our gait can reveal us to be buoyant or bullish, dispirited or steadfast.

...there's a path in this life with your name on it. What God means you to have, no one can take away from you. It's already yours. Our mission, as God's children, is to surrender to what he has ordained--and to freely let all else just pass us by.

Around the business, I have sometimes been called difficult. The truth is that I insist upon respect. I don't take any tea for the fever, child. Even now, at age ninety-six, I teach folks not to mess with me.

Concealing is the human way of pretending that we are who we imagine ourselves to be in the fairy tales we invent, that our lives have unfolded as we wish they would have rather than as they so wrenchingly do.

I stand amazed at this tree, this life. I stare up in awe at its branches, raising up toward heaven. I wonder about its origins, how a seed so miniscule could grow into a structure so vast and resilient. I'm still examining its genesis. To examine, to question, to discover and evolve--that is what it means to be alive. The day we cease to explore is the day we begin to wilt. I share my testimony in these pages not because I have reached any lasting conclusions, but because I have so much to understand. I am as inquisitive about life now as I was as a child. My story will never be finished, nor should it be. For as long as God grants me breath, I will be living--and writing--my next chapter.

When you know your history, you know your value. You know the price that has been paid for you to be here. You recognize what those who came before you built and sacrificed for you to inhabit the space in which you dwell.

The lie of Black inferiority was built right into America’s infrastructure, and to this day, that framework remains stubbornly intact.

The Father has a way of choosing the flawed to attempt what many deem improbable.

...in our culture, provision speaks a love language that the tongue may seldom profess.

said. “What’s for you in this life, you will get. And what is not for you, you will never get. Do you hear me?

Art, in a sense, is the transference of pleasure.

Intimidation is a prerequisite to growth as an artist.

When someone sees you headed in a direction, and that person throws a brick into the road, that is the precise moment to forge onward, with greater velocity, toward your destination.

You'll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse,' Denzel Washington often said as we worked together on 'Fences.' 'I don't care how much money you have or what level of notoriety you've achieved, you can't take any of it with you.' There is a cap on earthly success, a ceiling on the amount of joy that possessions and awards can bring before disillusionment sets in. Our appearance, our prosperity, the applause: all of it is so fleeting. But a life of true significance has unlimited impact. It is measured in how well we've loved those around us, how much we've given away, how many seeds we've sown along our path. During her ninety-six years, Ms. [Cicely] Tyson has discovered the potent elixir: she has lived a life of that is bigger than she is, an existence grounded in purpose and flourishing in service to others. That is her defining masterpiece. That is her enduring gift to us all. [Viola Davis, Foreword]

There is nothing our children cannot achieve when they’re given the proper tools and nurturing, starting with a belief in their own brilliance despite social messages to the contrary.

When a pivot is predestined on the stone tablet of your life story, there is often an inexplicable ease to it. It feels otherworldly, from an Almighty source beyond your frail humanity.

My true identity isn't rooted in our history, grievous and glorious as it is. It is grounded in my designation as a child of God, the daughter of the Great Physician. In his care, I find my cure.

When you bury a parent, you lower his or her casket into the ground, but the history between you lives on. The funeral is an ending, yes, but it is also a beginning - the start of a true reckoning with those hurts between you that must be laid to rest. When we buried my mother, I mourned her then and in the years that followed. As I grieved, I thought I'd long since come to terms with my father - with how he'd both delighted and failed me, with the ways in which he'd unknowingly bruised me just as all parents do, despite their best intentions.

I bickered weekly with my mother, railed against her rule more than I dared to during childhood. I see now that I wasn't fighting against her, but for myself. Defying her voice was my way of making space for my own, however feeble and uncertain. At the heart of our disputes lived my struggle for womanhood, my yearning to trust God's whispers and tune out all others.

...even those who care deeply for us cannot always see our big picture, the Grand Story Line that is destined to unfold before us. They are on their own journeys. And though their paths may run parallel to ours, each is singular in its curves and mileposts, unique in its destination. As much as others want the best for us, they do not necessarily understand God's best. He alone does.

Several years before Maya [Angelou] went home to heaven, she penned the poem popularly known as 'When Great Trees Fall,' but properly titled 'Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield,' a lyrical ode she ends this way: And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.... Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. Her sentiments, so often repeated, powerfully sum up what loss does to the human heart, how it lowers our heads and deepens our sorrows, and yet how, in the end, it miraculously restores us. When great trees fall, we weep in unity with the forest--and we rejoice at the legacy that lingers.

Do you have any idea how many elders find themselves in her position? They suddenly lose their spouses, their faculties, or both. They're then often living with their grown children, even as they crave an autonomy that has slipped away. Praise God I still have my independence and my mind, but I do know how it feels to grow vulnerable. No matter the measure of fortitude you carry, a certain anxiety arises. You know you cannot control all you once could, so you hold fast to the little you can still govern.

In the life of every Black child, a moment arrives when he or she becomes wrenchingly aware of how we are perceived. This bruising recognition was among my first.

applauds.

Rather, it was the Savior, by way of a pontiff’s warm palm, who kept me safe in his care.

Healing, as I see it, is not the absence of pain. Rather, it is a gradual reduction in the ache. The

People don’t come out of nowhere. They have roots.

That’s the power of education. It expands one’s field of vision, and in so doing, it lifts entire families and communities.

Children lie out of fear they will be punished in some way. But adults, as I see it, have no right to lie.

Let me tell you something, girl,” she said. “What’s for you in this life, you will get. And what is not for you, you will never get. Do you hear me?

You may dim love’s light, but when you’ve cared for someone, you never fully switch off the affection.

Social transformation is not measured in weeks or months, but in generation.

Even when we humans are busy shaking our heads no, shoving down our fears and shoving off our blessings, the Father has a way of propelling us forward, of moving us toward his way.

My mother’s falsehoods were not outright fabrications but lies of omission.

Use me, God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.

I began reading, taking in all I could about our history, about the assaults that tested us but could not break us. It stung me even as it flung open my eyes. America has our blood on its palms, our flesh between its teeth. When you come to understand what we have endured, when you let the barefaced savagery of it all truly penetrate, you are forever haunted by the horror.

My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

Relationships are knitted together by need. When two people connect, the purpose each is serving in the other's life is what holds the union in place, keeps the ragged edges of its hemline sewn.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Shirley Chisholm once said, “bring a folding chair.” Tyler did one better and built his own dining set, complete with all he needs to finance his storytelling.

These US doctors are trained to cut you and write prescriptions. That is all. They don't know a thing about healing you. They treat symptoms, not causes. Like other professionals, they're working to buy their homes and send their kids to Harvard. That doesn't mean they don't care about your wellness, or that they're not good at diagnosing, and some of their treatments are excellent and should be followed. But before you let anyone go sticking a knife or needle in you, you've got to investigate. You've got to be sure you know what's happening with your body. You've got to advocate for yourself and your loved ones.

When you ask God for strength, as I do daily, he doesn't usually just drop it from the sky. He often answers by placing you in a circumstance that requires you to build fortitude while relying solely on him.

People don’t come out of nowhere. They have roots.” Someone’s appearance and demeanor, she reasoned, offer clues to those beginnings, to the whys and hows of that person’s present state. That notion becomes applicable when analyzing a character, when noticing how his or her story may manifest in every tic and sway, every lurch forward. Infusing a portrayal with such layers of truth is an actor’s greatest aspiration.

We don't have long here, children. Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred. 'What is your life?' the scriptures ask us. 'You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes' (James 4:14, NIV). The Spirit is ever beckoning us to heed that wisdom, to get on with what we've been put here to do. And whatever that calling looks like, however it may seemingly vary from one person or season to the next, at its core, it is simply this: cherish one another. That is all. That is our purpose in its entirety, to bestow God's care on others.

We don't have long here, children. Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.

Rearing your children with affection and warmth is a form of activism. Honoring your word impeccably is a way to raise your voice. Performing your job with excellence - with your chin high and your standards higher - is as powerful as any protest march. Sowing into the lives of young people is a worthy crusade. That is what it means to leave this world of ours more lit up than we found it. It's also what it means to live a magnificent life, even if an unlikely one. The Father has a way of choosing the flawed to attempt what many deem improbable.

Just as I was crossing Madison Avenue, I somehow found myself flat out in the middle of the street. I had not tripped or missed a step. And yet there I was, down on the gravel with my heart galloping away. I quickly gathered myself and stumbled to my feet, shaken by what might have been if a car had sped through there. Oh no, Miles Davis, I’m not going with you, I thought as I stood. I wanted you in life, not in death. You chose to leave this place, but I’m not going anywhere. I believed then, as I do now, that Miles aimed to take me with him. And yet three decades later, I am, by God’s mercy, still right here.

Black women—our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones—are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us.

We are defined not by what grows from our heads, but what flows from our hearts. That is our greatest testimony. Our hair may be our crown, yet a life of love and service is our real glory. So as we navigate our journey, let us graciously make space for one another. Whether you relax it or coil it, weave it or dread it, cover it with a wig or cut it plumb off, the choice is yours. Good hair is your hair—however you decide to wear it.

My mom’s funeral was pathetic. She had saved up some money for a plot in Linden, New Jersey. There were only eight of us there – me, my brother and sister, my father Jimmy, her boyfriend Eddie, and three of my mother’s friends. I wore a suit that I had bought with some of the money that I had stolen. She only had a thin cardboard casket and there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Before we left the grave, I said, “Mom, I promise I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be the best fighter ever and everybody is going to know my name. When they think of Tyson, they’re not going to think of Tyson Foods or Cicely Tyson, they’re going to think of Mike Tyson.” I said this to her because this was what Cus had been telling me about the Tyson name. Up until then, our family’s only claim to fame was that we shared the same last name as Cicely. My mom loved Cicely Tyson.

I couldn’t help but think of the innocent Black men and women who’d hung from the branches above me, their cries cut short by the pull of a noose, their feet swaying back and forth, the blood draining from their faces along with their unfulfilled dreams. When I remember the thousands who died, many whose stories were never recorded in history, I bow my head. And when my wailing is done, I get up and I carry on, not in my own name, but in theirs.

I never leave home without my cayenne pepper. I either stash a bottle of the liquid extract in my pocket book or I stick it in the shopping cart I pull around with me all over Manhattan. When it comes to staying right side up in this world, a black woman needs at least three things. The first is a quiet spot of her own, a place away from the nonsense. The second is a stash of money, like the cash my mother kept hidden in the slit of her mattress. The last is several drops of cayenne pepper, always at the ready. Sprinkle that on your food before you eat it and it’ll kill any lurking bacteria. The powder does the trick as well, but I prefer the liquid because it hits the bloodstream quickly. Particularly when eating out, I won’t touch a morsel to my lips ‘til it’s speckled with with cayenne. That’s just one way I take care of my temple, aside from preparing my daily greens, certain other habits have carried me toward the century mark. First thing I do every morning is drink four glasses of water. People think this water business is a joke. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. I’ve known two elderly people who died of dehydration, one of whom fell from his bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand up because he was so parched. Following my water, I drink 8 ounces of fresh celery blended in my Vita-mix. The juice cleanses the system and reduces inflammation. My biggest meal is my first one: oatmeal. I soak my oats overnight so that when I get up all I have to do is turn on the burner. Sometimes I enjoy them with warm almond milk, other times I add grated almonds and berries, put the mixture in my tumbler and shake it until it’s so smooth I can drink it. In any form, oats do the heart good. Throughout the day I eat sweet potatoes, which are filled with fiber, beets sprinkled with a little olive oil, and vegetables of every variety. I also still enjoy plenty of salad, though I stopped adding so many carrots – too much sugar. But I will do celery, cucumbers, seaweed grass and other greens. God’s fresh bounty doesn’t need a lot of dressing up, which is why I generally eat my salad plain. From time to time I do drizzle it with garlic oil. I love the taste. I also love lychee nuts. I put them in the freezer so that when I bite into them cold juice comes flooding out. As terrific as they are, I buy them only once in awhile. I recently bit into an especially sweet one, and then I stuck it right back in the freezer. “Not today, Suzie,” I said to myself, “full of glucose!” I try never to eat late, and certainly not after nine p.m. Our organs need a chance to rest. And before bed, of course, I have a final glass of water. I don’t mess around with my hydration.

No amount of black girl magic, no repeated proclamations of our worth can fully treat the wound – although acknowledging its persistence is a beginning. The ultimate remedy, as I see it is supernatural. I look daily toward heaven for restoration, for spiritual healing. My true identity isn’t rooted in our history, grievous and glorious as it is. It is grounded in my designation as a Child of God, the Daughter of the Great Physician. In His care I find my cure. My hope for you is the same one I carry for myself. I pray that amid the heartache of our ancestry you can grant yourself the grace so seldom extended to us. I pray that you can pass that compassion on to your children and to their children so that it slathers comfort on our sore spots. I pray that, as a people, we can give ourselves a soft place to land. I pray even as we rightly express our fury as being regarded as sub-human, that we don’t dwell in that space. That we don’t allow anger to poison our spirits. That we embrace love as our One True Antidote. I hope, too, that you recognize your specialness, the distinctiveness the Creator has imbued us with. I see you as clearly as history has, and in unison with it, I nod. I know that swivel in your hips, that fervor in your testimony, that ebullience in your stride, that flair in your song. The fact that others are constantly trying to diminish you, ever attempting to dismiss your talents even as they mimic you, is proof of your uniqueness! No one bothers to undermine you unless they recognize your brilliance. More than anything, I pray that you can carve out a purpose for yourself, a calling beyond your own survival, a sweet offering to the world. You gain a life by giving yours away. Not everyone is meant to raise a picket sign, and yet each of us can choose a path of impact. Rearing your children with affection and warmth is a form of activism. Honoring your word impeccably is a way to raise your voice. Performing your job with excellence, with your chin high and your standards higher is as powerful as any protest march. Sowing into the lives of young people is a worthy crusade. That is what it means to leave this world of ours more lit up than we found it. It’s also what it means to lead a magnificent life, even if an unlikely one.

White folks have been Other-izing us for hundreds of years, initially because that served their purpose in justifying our enslavement. Brutes, or those labeled as less than human, needn’t be accorded respect. Just as they have policed our bodies, they have criminalized our tresses while attempting to extinguish our very existence. In minstrel shows, in books, on television, in kitchen-table conversations, our natural hair has always been under siege in a calculated campaign to devalue us.

Our ancestors, long before they were sold from their homeland, took great pride in the appearance of their hair. Our foremothers created the world’s most ornate, intricate, and diverse hairstyles, squeezing their young’uns between their thighs, swapping laughter with every braid and twist. In our communities, to be groomed was to be loved. With our mothers’ hands down in our scalps, in the tenderness present in their palms, we felt cared for and connected. Hair, for us, was the opposite of disgrace. It represented intimacy. During the Middle Passage, our untended locks became matted, our rituals and unique hair tools were stolen from us. In the new land, European traders often cut off the tresses of their “cargo,” their animals covered in “wool,” not human hair. The dehumanization did not end there. In European narratives, our hair has been presented as mangy and unmanageable, dirty and rough.

resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it. These reporters’ beliefs, however offensive they may have been to me, were not a bitterness to be nursed;

A race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots. —CHARLES C. SIEFERT, The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art

Who is she?” Lloyd would ask me about a character I was preparing to depict. “What are the moments that have shaped her?” He understood that meeting a character on the page was akin to making her acquaintance in life. To study that character—to insatiably pursue her backstory, to dissect her memories and her motivations—was to begin the process of becoming her.

I refused to have some man, with his hot breath on my neck and his pasty fingers on my nipples, impede my plan.

When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul. And altered I was. Contrary to the mythology surrounding the unflinching nature of African-American women, we, too, experience trauma. Black women—our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones—are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us. The resulting Fun House image, a haphazard depiction sketched beneath the dim light of ignorance, allows ample room for our strength, our rage and tenacity, to stand at center stage. When we express anger, the audience of the world applauds. That expression aligns with their portrait of us. As long as we play our various designated roles—as court jesters and as comic relief, as Aunt Jemimas and as Jezebels, as maids whisking aperitifs into drawing rooms, as shuckin’ and jivin’ half-wits serving up levity—we are worthy of recognition in their meta-narrative. We are obedient Negroes. We are dutiful and thus affirmable. But when we dare tiptoe outside the lines of those typecasts, when we put our full humanity on display, when we threaten the social constructs that keep others in comfortable superiority, we are often dismissed. There is no archetype on file in which a Black woman is simultaneously resolute and trembling, fierce and frightened, dominant and receding. My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

The gratification for me comes in the doing of the work, the creation—the embodying of a character so fully that the audience comes to believe, feel, see, smell, and taste her existence, climb into her reality, understand her humanity as a means for reflecting upon their own.

Even when we humans are busy shaking our heads no, shoving down our fears and shoving off our blessings, the Father has a way of propelling us forward, of moving us toward his way. Warren

Nature has bestowed Black people with one of its most prized gifts, melanin, and in a society where we are seldom allowed an advantage, Warren understood the importance of utilizing mine.

It was her way of loving me, of trying to redirect my steps and shift my affections away from the strivings of this world and back toward the kingdom of heaven. And yet even those who care deeply for us cannot always see our big picture, the Grand Story Line that is destined to unfold before us. They are on their own journeys. And though their paths may run parallel to ours, each is singular in its curves and mileposts, unique in its destination. As much as others want the best for us, they do not necessarily understand God’s best. He alone does.