A Quote by Liz Murray

I realized that I had the ability to carve out a life for myself, that it was in no way limited by what had already occurred in my past. And that inspired me to go to school.
If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
I came out when I was 15 at school, and I realized I had put myself into a precarious situation. It was a very hostile environment for me, and a lot of kids had it in for me. It was a scary situation. I was very impatient. I wanted to grow up now.
I realized that if I was going to achieve anything in life I had to be aggressive. I had to get out there and go for it... I know fear is an obstacle for some people, but it's an illusion to me.
So often, we're expected to maintain some sort of standard - that won't get you where you need to go. One of the most daring things I've done is drop out of graduate school. I had no job, but something inside me was saying, 'Go! Be in the world!' I had to listen to myself, and it worked out. I still think, 'Who was that girl?'
Before that I had largely thought of selling as just a way of making a living for myself. I had dreaded to go in to see people, for fear I was making a nuisance of myself. But now I was inspired! I resolved right then to dedicate the rest of my selling career to this principle: finding out what people want, and helping them get it.
When I finally did stop and look at my life, I realized that I had done what I'd set out to do. In my pitiful little way, I had climbed the mountain I had chosen. And there I was, on top.
I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.
There have been a lot of times in my life where I came out to a perfect stranger by some chance encounter. It's way easier than coming out to your family. I started high school 'out,' then I had to tell my family. I had to introduce myself to the family.
Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.
I went to USC where there's a huge Greek system. The school is in a pretty seedy area, so the only social life is at these fraternities. I never joined one myself, but I had a lot of friends who were in frats and I would go to those parties. I had a healthy dose of being around frat life while I was in school.
Choices had become limited post 'Crook' and I was being offered films that had me play second fiddle. I realized that would take me nowhere, so I waited.
It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.
I think Splash made people realize that I was still alive, and I think I inspired a lot of people. I have people coming up to me all the time in the airport saying, "Hey, you inspired me to learn how to swim!" "You inspired me to start moving around more." "You inspired me to start doing more for myself." So that was good. But mostly I took it because nobody had given me a job. And you know what really matters in life, right?
I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.
I ended up dropping out of high school. I'm a high school dropout, which I'm not proud to say, ... I had some teachers that I still think of fondly and were amazing to me. But I had other teachers who said, 'You know what? This dream of yours is a hobby. When are you going to give it up?' I had teachers who I could tell didn't want to be there. And I just couldn't get inspired by someone who didn't want to be there
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