Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Mariel Hemingway

I'm not that old, and I haven't lived a life so far from the ordinary, really.

I began by doing physical yoga, initially just for the workout, as exercise. I would get peaceful and calm at the end of it, and I was curious about that.

What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

Manhattan, though, was an entirely different ballgame in a whole different kind of world, with a man who was brilliant and at the same time terribly charismatic.

Yoga teaches you how to listen to your body.

I was taken by the romanticism of being thought of as an adult and living in a world that was completely new to me. I fell in love with acting then.

Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn't getting it. And my husband wasn't getting it, either.

Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.

Everybody needs a way out of that pain. Many people choose drugs and alcohol. Some people obsessively exercise or develop strange dietary habits, which is what I did. At least it got me toward a path of healthier living.

Starting out in a beginner class and really understanding the fundamentals of yoga is really important.

The experience of getting my Kriya, which is the meditation process that I do, was very powerful for me - though, as I explain in the book, I was really suspect of that kind of thing.

I did Star 80, which was a magnificent experience as well, but still, I was at the height of my career at the beginning. Then I had to jump down the ladder and climb back up again, which I didn't understand. That was very hard.

My problems aren't so different from anybody else.

It's not that I don't believe in miracles, but I never quite trust that they're real.

I wanted out of my pain and that silliness, but I wanted an easy out. That's before realizing that there is no easy out. Before accepting that you just have to do the work.

I don't have to go to church. The church is within me and the experience is my own. It's my life experience.

For me, first, it's finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It's also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.

I enjoyed doing Lipstick, but it scared me. I was very nervous. I couldn't wait for it to be over. It was very real, and I was just a kid.

I felt I had to share Idaho with my friend from New York because he'd shared New York with me, so I was going to share the beauty of nature with a man who went to museums and clubs late at night. But there was nothing to do where I lived at night.

We're taught to take care of people we love, but sometimes you can't.

I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.

I think we should be passionately curious about what we do.

I loved acting when I was doing it, but getting the jobs I didn't understand because I'd never had to do it. That was a difficult lesson for me. It was very humbling and very bizarre.

I got back into the position of taking care of my husband, which is what I'd learned that I couldn't really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can't fix. I didn't quite learn that until the kayaking incident. It became so clear then.

I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don't know it's happening.

Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.

But the experience that I had, which was basically just feeling loved and taken care of in a room full of thousands of people I didn't know, seemed to be a pretty strong sign that what I was doing was a good thing.

I don't take myself terribly seriously. It's why I can be incredibly honest about my life.

Finding some quiet time in your life, I think, is hugely important.

The other thing is surrounding yourself with people that care for you. These are simple things, but they're powerful, and they've completely transformed who I am and how I perceive myself.

I've known for years that you're supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what's happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I'm not present.

What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I'd react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.

When child actors act well they're just reacting to situations, and they're acting very real because their life experience is so short; there's no history to fall back on.

A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.

I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.

I think that things like curses or whatever - those labels - come from belief systems, universal belief systems. So when you get a global consciousness of something, then that becomes a quote-unquote "truth" for everybody. You know, "This is what happens in the Kennedy family." "This is what happens with the Hemingways." And the more people believe in it, the more it kind of resuscitates the problem; it keeps bringing life to this idea that a curse exists that you can never get out from under.

The 'Hemingway curse' was such a huge, awful thing for me to have to deal with. . . . The reality is, because there are genetic tendencies toward mental illness, you need to be aware of them.

How you live your life can affect your mental state.

I'm really excited to act again because when I started out, there was an innocent sort of perception of the world that was coming though me, and I think now through a lot of experience and life and understanding, I've come full circle to having a purer response to things. So my craft will be really interesting to work from this place because I think acting is about being in tune with yourself - or maybe the struggle to be in tune with yourself.

We do have the ability to shift our paradigms - by shifting our belief systems, by working on ourselves, by looking very closely at how we show up in the world. It's why I'm into health and wellness. It's why my partner and I are very focused on creating a life that is about being connected; it's about being present. Because my life was probably so much in the past. I was so fearful. I was so fearful of the future because I was so scared of my past. So if you can work towards being present, then you can shift.

I do a lot of work with mental health and wellness, which I also believe has a lot to do with your lifestyle as well - what you're eating, how you're living, what you're thinking. How you live your life can affect your mental state.

Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "dark night of the soul" - it's a reality for many, many people.

Having been through a tremendous amount of emotional pain, to process it properly, to be able to have it make sense and then move it through your body, your mind, your spirit, and be done with it, you really have to address it head-on. Being able to really have the courage enough to truly face it, to truly look at it, to truly feel it.

Living a simpler life has turned out to be one of the keys to being more awake and healthy.

In old interviews I was still worried about being judged. I think my life was about how can I keep myself in control. How can I just get through this and be okay? And, you know, you turn the corner. You realize that you're not imprisoned by your life or your circumstances or your genetics or anything. I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.

We live in a society running from pain through alcohol, through too much exercise, through sugar, through drugs - as opposed to realizing that these things come up because they are lessons. It's a way to wake you up.

Whatever it is that you do in your life, you're your own guide.

Since I come from a family of mental instability, and I have suffered depression myself, I knew that living in shame is senseless and painful, and that by talking about it, I have come to peace with it. The stigma behind people's suffering needs to end. We as a community need to embrace these disorders, try to understand them (if only just to talk about them) so that we can cease being defined by them.

Each second is a second you can make a new choice, a better choice, a healthy choice, a present choice.

People can sense you lying on the camera, they can smell it. They know when you're not telling the truth. Then it does become reality-show bullshit.

If you don't step across the threshold of what you already know into the world of challenges, you never truly measure yourself.

You have to have a little faith in people.

I'm an extremely vulnerable person. Vulnerability and emotion are very closely linked.

If you're an addict, if you drink and you're putting a depressant into your body, it's going to cause serious problems.

There's nothing beautiful about somebody killing themselves.

I've suffered from pretty dark depressing times, and it's probably - not probably - it is the reason why I chose to lead a healthy lifestyle.

There's no doctor in a white coat that's going to save you, or a system or a pill - it's always going to be you and the choices that you make.

Maybe in any art you have to be wholly you in the context of whatever you're doing.

You can turn just about any simple act into a practice of mindfulness, and it will nurture and nourish you; it will start your day off in a positive way.