Minnie Driver Quotes

Never underestimate the stories people tell themselves about how much better someone else’s life is.

When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing – that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls – it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness’ sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad – let it be both.

Last night I went and saw Good Will Hunting, which takes place not exactly where I used to live, in Boston, but pretty darn close, so I've been all flush with nostalgia for it. I was in Boston from summer of '89 until spring of '92... ...I think it's the ultimate nerd fantasy movie. It's a bit of a fairy tale, but I enjoyed it a lot. Minnie Driver is really to fall sideways for. And there's all sorts of cool stuff. It's actually a movie that's got calculus in it. It takes place in Boston.

No one tells you how birth and death are so closely aligned. Here, lying in the dark, I see it: pain, a journey that goes toward only one thing and the deep need to have someone with you to hold onto. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the "end" - never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops. Infinite human experience of beginning and ending, so deeply connected, only one instilling fear.

We all pretend until the pretense becomes practiced and, I suppose, looks like reality

What impossible nonsense has been thrown at women down through the ages, and how tirelessly do they continue to rise to the challenge.

Everything is two things, I think, or even more than two things. I feel happy and sad about being here at this school, there are people who love the idea of the new road and people who hate it, I am consistently both pissing people off and making them laugh.

It is an existential corridor where I’m not tethered to who I was on departure or who I’ll be when I land. The pressure of expectation is released. That’s not to say I want to run naked down the aisle and grab a drinks trolley from the galley, but rather that all the myriad interactions with life are put on hold. It is the relaxation of an exhale of a pause. I am anyone here.

I like to dance, too,” I said. “In fact, I love it. Why do you think the expectation is to dance with someone else? I danced by myself for six hours straight and it was just so nice not to have to interact with anyone.” “I dunno,” she said. “It’s a weird social contract, like flailing around and expressing yourself is okay if you’re both doing it but if you’re doing it alone, you’re a saddo who no one wants to dance with.

A woman never steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and she is not the same woman.

until all that was left was the one hot truth, that beyond the horizon there’s just more horizon. There is no THERE there.

It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin.

There are clearly certain thoughts that keep playing through a life, though, like songs on repeat. They are for you, and you alone, and however much you try to involve other people in them, they really have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

realizing there was no-where to spit out the chocolate, I did what so many women do in the name of pleasing men, and I swallowed.

Truth as invective has always puzzled me.

I looked at the tall man through the rearview mirror—newly heroic and cheerfully crushed into my tiny car—and I knew that I loved him. Hot on the heels of this realization was the accompanying acknowledgment that it did not take a great deal for me to fall in love. Being defended, considerateness, a train door held open, making room on a crowded pub bench—these things regularly not only triggered my devotion, they also were watertight assurances of my lifelong happiness with this new stranger. The thing was, I was completely aware of how nuts it was to feel a whole life together on the back of a kind word, but it never stopped me from falling in love. As a truly terrible person I once fell in love with said when I told him I first loved him after he’d given me a lift home: “That’s not just nuts, it’s also crazy.

It is NOT unfair, it is just LIFE,” she said, squeezing my arm emphatically on the words “NOT” and “LIFE.” “It is sad and ridiculous, and it is amazing and to be celebrated. That is it. Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing—that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls—it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad—let it be both.

In a way, it was the perfect vengeance to wreak on a cheating lover; yoked to their deeds and betrayal, they drag those things on into the next version of their life and relationships, hopefully feeling like there’s never quite enough room to exist comfortably next to them, always having to manage a pinch of compression. The abandoned is gifted with emptiness. No secrets or remains to awkwardly accommodate, and once the ash is swept, a clear offering to a new beginning. I had questions, though.

It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin. Make gravy you don’t remember, live while you’re dying, fight the unassailable.

The solution to a problem is never commensurate with the size of the problem.

Exiting through the doors of the hospital feels like stepping from inside into another inside. There is no stepping outside this experience, I feel quite clearly that I am still in the room with Mum, even as I stand in the rain. We are hermetically sealed into this other reality; we don’t leave it until it’s really time to go. Until the door appears. I think about the Helen Keller quote we only ever say part of, When one door closes, another one opens. That’s what we all say; the actual quote is: When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. I walk down the street in my bubble; amazing to be in two places at once. When the door opens I think, I will try to keep looking at it.

I wonder if, when teaching something as ephemeral as acting, you have to do this, and that building a scaffold around a muse is how you tether yourself to her. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize how much of what they taught was mulled with this secret knowledge, only relayed in the last moments of their teaching: That for all your adherence to discipline, your observance of the rules of iambic pentameter and how to sit down while wearing a sword without crushing your balls—the chances of you making a living as an actor are cadaverously slim.

No, getting lost in whatever you’re personally going through at the expense of your performance. Use it, don’t telegraph it.

Later, when I had been shot out of the cannon into fame, I would see that it is a trope returned to by journalist after journalist. It has a strange queasy effect, reading something about yourself that is absolutely true but is presented as a fault: “She is tall and thin and eats very little for lunch.” “Her teeth are always bared when she smiles.” “None of her relationships has lasted more than a year.” I often wondered why they use truth as an assault when there were more devastating weapons available. Before social media offered a platform to do so, I wanted so many times to rejoin: “Don’t you realize how unimaginative and toothless it is to call me what I am? You’d really do far more damage sneering at me for what I’m not—for all the things I have tried so hard to be and have so far failed at. Honestly, ask me like, three questions about myself and I’ll give you proper ammo for a more interesting assassination.

It was very peaceful until an actress I vaguely recognized started wailing about being fat. “Oh, you’re not fat, you’re pregnant,” cooed a few of the other women. “How am I ever going to get cast in anything when I’ve got a giant ass and a baby?” She was pretty and blond, but her petulant shaming of her body was disfiguring.

I didn’t mind putting on weight; it was shape-shifting, and becoming the legitimate identity of a mother made me suddenly feel more credible as a human. Most of the time, being pregnant, I felt like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, and sometimes like some gentle, bovine creature—large and constantly eating.

Wherever possible, when there’s likelihood of water being present, hot or cold weather, fancy party or picnic—I will wear a swimsuit under my clothes. It starts out as a practicality when you grow up part of the time in a hot country. It ends up being comforting. If there’s the ocean or a river or a pool, I will always be able to find a way to excuse myself and jump in. People don’t think you’re trying to get away from them when you go for a swim. They think you’re healthy, strong, secure in how your body looks stripped down. If the weather is cold or raining, they think you’re brave. They do not know that water is my escape hatch, the perfect distraction from my anxiety in the shape of a cool gesture.

Women sit on the edge with their legs dangling in the water while their children scream “MOM! Watch THIS” and then proceed to perform no particular feat beyond splashing around, illustrating something I have always known, which is that 90 percent of good parenting is bearing witness.

I suddenly realized that circumstances are not weight-bearing. They do not create a structure upon which to safely build your life. Circumstances can change in an instant. And that shifting can stop plans from manifesting. My plan was now just an idea that apparently had run its course. So what was I supposed to do now that I’d done everything I thought I was supposed to do?

No one tells you how birth and death are so closely aligned. Here, lying in the dark, I see it: pain, a journey that goes toward only one thing and the deep need to have someone with you to hold on to. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the “end”—never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops. Infinite human experience of beginning and ending, so deeply connected, only one instilling fear. I am not frightened anymore. We are on an adventure, and this is not some eleventh-hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination. We are together, this person who was my portal into life. This rare, funny, independent creature who would do the same for me: walk with me as far as she could and then wave me off with love, safe in the knowledge that life had equipped me with everything I needed to meet death as the newest of my many experiences.

I think again of that thing no one tells you about birth—that as your body offers up your child to the outside world, your very first job as a mother is to let go. I really never thought about the fact that that gift, if you’re lucky, needs to be returned in kind.

What was bad, I thought, as I walked back down Brewer Street, was the appearance of this line that would always be there. I could choose to cross or not cross, but either action would have practical and moral consequences. You speak up—they won’t hire you. You don’t speak up—you actually feel the good part of you begin to erode.

Mum’s voice gets higher as she grips my hand and relives the same awful details again and again. I do what she would have done, back when I was small and outraged, red-faced with some unfairness or pain, caught in the eddy of my story. Shhh, shhhh, it’s done. It’s done. We are here. You are all right. Breathe. I know it was terrible. I am here. The pieces of parenting she gifted me, without knowing, are pieces of her. Now they are me. Maybe it’s not roles being reversed but rather a relay race that goes round like a story, a happier story. Softly, the light changes outside. Fresh nurses relieve tired ones; the thread of meticulous kindness is picked up. Mum sleeps.

In the bath, there could have been a eureka moment of clarity, a soulful call to acknowledge the journey instead of fixating on the destination, but I only felt the existential dread I’d woken up with—that coquettish desire and Bible-thumping resolution were gone.

I always want grown-ups to like me but find it difficult to behave in a way that seems to consistently please them. Grown-up love appears to be very conditional, and they are not conditions I can really abide by—not for long, anyway. One minute they’re laughing at the fact that I know what “existential” means and the next moment they’re all “Can you shut up now? You’re really getting on my nerves.” I feel like the problem really lies with them, that all the rules they have are made up as they go along, that a couple of drinks or a bad night’s sleep will engender a totally new set of expectations from them. It must be hard for them to keep up with their ever-changing opinions. It must be hard to keep redrawing the lines of their own boundaries. It’s part of why I like them; I rather pity them.

Maybe, I thought, I just needed a force who had a job that didn’t disappear like a mirage every few months. I realized I was that force and for the hundredth time in my life thought about finding another career. This thought dissipated the larger I grew, however, subsumed by the physical job at hand. Filled with hormones and heat, I felt the superpower of creation, and without dismissing sperm as one of its vital components, person-building inside your own body is a one-woman show. I felt invincible, which became the remedy to my fear and saw me pacing around my house late at night looking at my stuff and verbally auctioning everything off for the baby while explaining that we could live off the proceeds for a fairly good amount of time and not worry.

I was beginning to see that the greatest difference between adults and children was that they had to provide answers whereas we could just ask questions. Imagine having to know everything. It felt like a burden I couldn’t imagine ever wanting. Also, answers felt so finite; they left no possibility of a surprise ending—they closed the door that a question had opened. I really liked asking questions and always enjoyed the conversations they elicited more than the answer. I would have liked to have had the conversation with my father about why he needed to send me away. I didn’t need to know the actual reason per se, I just wanted to hear the question out loud and see what he did with it. Maybe he had some questions of his own, maybe if he asked a few more of them out loud, the questions themselves would interrogate the reality, giving it context and the space to settle. Maybe then he wouldn’t have had to come up with answers that left both of us so far away from each other.

Do you think men can change?” “Of course they can,” he said very gently. “But I think it might be misguided to base your happiness on them changing, particularly if you have seen their lack of change played out for a long time, with no apparent evolution.

These particular words should really be my epitaph. Though I never realized it throughout my childhood, they are the condemnation from which all my adventures will spring; the apparent finality and incarceration will give me something to break free and run from. They are actually extremely creative words in disguise. At eleven, though, it is too good a disguise for me to see through.

I’m sorry, darling. What are you sorry about? Being a shit mother. This is something she has said and worried about my whole adult life. Sometimes she makes herself a victim of the thought and sometimes it carries a deep plea for forgiveness. I had always been exasperated by the statement and felt it asked me to repeatedly qualify that there had been shit moments of selfishness that accompany any human, mother or not, but that she, in all honesty, was not a shit mother. There are clearly certain thoughts that keep playing through a life, though, like songs on repeat. They are for you, and you alone and however much you try to involve other people in them, they really have nothing to do with anyone but yourself. Here, in whatever end-of-life moment we are in, it is suddenly necessary to lay those thoughts to rest. Take the stylus off the record, delete the playlist. There’s nothing to be sorry about, Mum. So what if you were, what if it were true? Does it matter? Because here we are together, talking . . . together. I love you and more than that, I know I love you, and I see who we are together—we laugh a lot, you are who I want to call when things are bad or good or interesting. So how can you being a shit mother really be something that carries any weight in terms of what it did to me, your child?—It didn’t. Which makes me think you weren’t, or at least, not entirely. She has fallen asleep, but she is smiling. I think even though it was a bit of a ramble, I made a good point. In making it, I realize I absolutely mean it.

Grown ups are an absolute mystery, and I had found that if I just took them at face value and didn't get involved in their motivations, their personal shit would always be recognizable as something that belonged to them and had nothing to do with me.

I think again of that thing no one tells you about birth, that as your body offers up your child to the outside world your very first job as a mother is to let go. I really never thought about the fact that that gift, if you're lucky, needs to be returned in kind.

We all pretend until pretense becomes practiced and I suppose, looks like reality.

Being a new adult furnished with childhood dreams, being asked to manifest it is a world of adult expectation.

Lauren Bacall.

I dunno about reincarnation, but I do know that we live many lives in this one.

The thing about being someone else for a living is that you (the actual person you are) run the risk of being discarded in favor of the shiny new mantle you are paid to step into. It offers a real possibility of having yourself described not just by the characters you play, but also by the inattention to your inner self. It felt dangerous and delicious to think of never having to excavate my own inner landscape in favor of ephemera.

Kathleen Turner’s

But isn’t a person supposed to be kinda more . . . whole? Don’t you think I might start making bad decisions if it’s just one little disconnected piece making the decision?