Top 227 Quotes & Sayings by Evangeline Lilly

I'm a good Canadian girl. I miss all that good stuff. I miss tobogganing and I miss snowboarding, but I've also learned to surf and I've become a water baby which I used to be relatively terrified of the water and I kayak all the time now and I'm able to run year round on the beach which you can't obviously do in Canada.

I'm from Canada, and New Zealand feels like you took all the best bits of Canada and squished them onto a tiny island like Hawaii. I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of the South Island.

The world is full of opportunities, and I want to try as many as I possibly can.

Life is magically beautiful. And it brings you what is perfect.

I have an American son and an American partner, so marriage might logistically make sense at one point. My partner is a stay-at-home father, so if he wants to be on my health plan, or tax wise, or maybe on paper we want to have our I's dotted and our T's crossed, but emotionally, neither of us really feels the need for it.

I just like short hair on women; I think it's cool.

I love being outside - that's where I'm the happiest.

I never developed hard cartilage in my ears because I played with them since I was a baby. I can fold my ear entirely inside out, and I can put the whole thing inside itself.

When I got the job on 'Lost,' I was a broke university student living in the crappiest part of town, with a duct-taped back window on a broken-down car. I existed on peanut butter and tea.

Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.

I'm a very stubborn woman and I'm from a very stubborn family of headstrong women. I have sisters, so the women rule the coop in my house.

Even if you're unhappy, just pretend that you're happy. Eventually, your smile will be contagious to yourself. I had to learn that. I used to think, 'I'm being fake,' but you know what? Better to be fake and happy than real and miserable.

I was a good student, I was good at soccer, I was vice president of the student council, I was a pretty girl.

'Real Steel' was this lovely little piece where I held a cup of coffee and talked to Hugh Jackman for three weeks. And that sounded kind of nice.

I was a massive Tolkien fan. 'The Hobbit' was... my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.

'Why are we here?' 'What is our purpose? 'Is there an afterlife?' 'Is there a God?' 'Is it all about science?' Those are big questions, and usually, TV is a little scared to go there.

My family didn't have a lot of money, and I'm grateful for that. Money is the longest route to happiness.

If I were to live in Africa, serving the poor, the number-one thing I'd miss wouldn't be running water or electricity - it would be style... being able to get dressed up and feel beautiful.

I think I'm not always what I seem. Most people, when they get to know me, say, 'You know, when I first met you...' People initially think I'm a snob because I'm intensely private.

I have battled clinical depression and have come out of the other side. I've been free of it for many years now. Finding the place in my own mind and heart to win that battle without using medication, finding the place within myself where I could be alive again, that was one of the biggest challenges I've faced.

To put it simply - you know, a lot of people believe that the benefit of this job is fame and fortune. I believe that you pay for the fortune through the fame. I don't buy into the notion that being famous is somehow a good thing, or an exciting thing, or a wonderful thing.

I would love to pretend I don't diet, but I work very hard. I stay active and eat very healthy. Anybody who says otherwise is either unhealthy or lying! I will admit that I'm addicted to sugar - licorice, Jujubees and jelly candies. And I actually love bran muffins!

Every other 16-year-old girl wanted to look at bridal magazines; I could not have been more bored with the notion.

When I hear the words 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen,' I think, 'What. A. Dream.' There are no negative connotations to it.

When I got old enough to date, I realized that Valentine's Day is just a commercial marketing scam to make men feel bad. So I let my boyfriends off the hook.

I'm very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don't even like the word 'feminism' because when I hear that word, I associate it with women trying to pretend to be men, and I'm not interested in trying to pretend to be a man. I don't want to embrace manhood; I want to embrace my womanhood.

I think that being isolated from the Hollywood world of premieres and red carpet events was probably good for me because I could ease into those at will and by my own choice. But in other aspects, when it comes to fanfare, Hawaii is nuts and in L.A. they're all so jaded. They don't care.

People were fed up with reality shows about midgets getting married and weird Jerry Springer talk shows. There had been a real dry spell of intelligent family-oriented viewing: the type of program that Mom, Dad and the kids can all watch together. With 'Lost,' there are just so many characters for people to invest in.

That's what happens in Hollywood. People are like, 'I want to hate you, because everyone else seems to love you.' But the reality is this: I'm a simple person who's not interested in attention and who just wants to go about her business.

I definitely come down on the spiritual side. I think very few things in life happen by chance.

I have been a bit of a reluctant actress since the get-go, since the beginning of 'Lost.'

I think women in Hollywood who don't do Botox and plastic surgery are revered. I revere them... My plan is to never go there. I'm too vain to get plastic surgery because I don't like how it looks, and I want to look my best.

I didn't grow up in a home that glorified Hollywood. We didn't watch TV. We didn't have a lot of magazines around.

'The Squickerwonkers' was the story I wrote when I was on 'The Hobbit.' And I brought it to Comic-Con and sold out a thousand copies I had printed.

If Americans could choose, would they choose to work on the infrastructure for cancer-causing oil power or would they choose to work on the infrastructure for health-reviving wind power?

The difference in my body from pre-pregnancy to post-baby was night and day. I didn't have the strength, I didn't have the flexibility, I didn't have the stamina, I didn't have the mobility. I felt like I was handicapped.

I always wear something slightly masculine.

There are jobs to be created on both sides of the climate argument. Whether we are investing in oil or sun, coal or wind, gas or algae, the economy will be stimulated by the investment. The economy, unlike each of us, is not swayed by ideology.

I'm the kind of person who, if I were living in another time, if I had to pick any time, I would probably be a pioneer. I just love the simplicity of what it means to work hard with your hands - to eat and survive.

I was fortunate enough to be one of those stories where I was scouted on the street by somebody and actually refused to go to the agency, and was approached on different occasions and finally kind of caved and said, 'OK, I'll try it and see what happens.'

I'm good at looking good with weapons and stunts. But if you put a bull's eye in front of me and asked me to hit it, I'd say the chances of me hitting it are about one in a million!

I love getting older! I really believe that a woman doesn't reach her peak until her 40s.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

If you can't sit in a cafe quietly and be ignored, how can you observe human nature and write a story?

I am a classy dame.

Your mind and soul are the kings of your physique way more than any exercise you do.

It is a very frustrating thing to be the face of a creative project and yet essentially have zero creative control over that project. Essentially, you're a pawn in the system.

My heart is in helping people and in the less materialistic side of things, but there's the side of me that's more polished.

I don't watch TV. When people at my house try to talk about TV, I'm like, 'Ah, I have no idea what I'm talking about.'

The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.

There's nothing more frustrating than when fans use a nickname. That's like people you don't know using names from people that you're intimate with. Like if my mom has a nickname and a fan finds it out and starts using it, that's creepy.

A month and a half after my first audition, I won the role on 'Lost.'

I'm very picky when it comes to men. I come across a man who I'm really attracted to about once every five years.

I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because of the way men leered at and disrespected me.

One of the things that I miss about Canada is that even the strangers, you have an immediate rapport, there's just an understanding that we're all good people, let's be nice to each other. And Kiwis have that. I find the Kiwis have that.

A creative project is a moving target. You never end up where you start.

In your 20s you can be pretty, but you don't accomplish real beauty until you find wisdom and depth.

I got the script for 'Real Steel.' I started reading and saw that it was about robot boxing, and I was immediately turned off. It's not my thing. But I continued on, and by the time I got to the end of the script, I had chicken skin and tears in my eyes. I thought, 'Man, we don't make movies like this anymore.'

Every woman is after a kind of classy image.

I consider acting a day job - it's not my dream; it's not my be-all, end-all.