A Quote by Aja Naomi King

Studying acting has been personally enriching because it has taught me to take the time to imagine what someone else's life experience might be like. To look deeply at how our pasts and the circumstances of our early childhoods mold us as people.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.
By delivering experience, novels can alter the stance we adopt toward news - not much, I'm sure, but they can make it a little more difficult for us to consign "other people" to our tidy boxes. Widening our imaginative life might - it's not hard to imagine - also develop our ability to contemplate counterfactuals and our capacity to speculate about how things might differ from how they're being represented.
Do you realize how many people of this country have been educated, have grown up, who have been taught that, yeah, we're at risk and there's a lot of people that want to blow us up and don't like us. But we are to blame. That's what they've been taught. We are to blame, 'cause there was slavery, because we've stolen all these goods and resources from other countries. We have imposed our way of life on them! We've sent our military around, and we've conducted wars on their territory and so forth.
I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.
I love acting. I can't imagine anything else that I would do. I know a lot of actors that really want to be directors and be musicians and all that stuff. I like acting and I feel like I'm good at it. It kinda makes me happy. It's actually pretty easy to me and I can't imagine doing anything else at this point because I've been doing it for so long.
Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It's the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude.
I look at the NFL and see how the transition has gone at quarterback. I might be coming along at a good time. For me personally, this is about doing the same thing I've been doing at USF - just smile, have fun, enjoy the experience, keep a positive attitude and encourage my teammates. I like to feed off the people around me.
Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn't go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that's because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents' faces.
At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it’ll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.
There are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our encouragement, who will need our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give.
The lesson that I would hope everyone would learn quite early in their career is don't take it personally. Whatever it is that happens, you're accepted for a role or rejected for a role of whatever, don't take it personally. It's part of the business and the person that is either hiring or firing-that's their business. That's what they are there for and it has nothing to do with how you feel about ... It has to do with someone else's perception of should you do this particular part, so just don't take it personally,. The business is really about rejection, so don't take it personally.
When I was doing 'Generation Kill' in Africa I worked with five really super-trained Navy SEALs who taught us all these moves like how to disarm people: if there's a bar fight and someone's got a chair or there's someone with a gun behind our head, how to disable them and take them down in a swift move.
Tests and trials are given to all of us. These mortal challenges allow us and our Heavenly Father to see whether we will exercise our agency to follow His Son. He already knows, and we have the opportunity to learn, that no matter how difficult our circumstances, all these things shall be for our experience, and our good.
I do not understand how deeply people seem to like my work - but I love that people feel I have helped them through hardships, and also have shared my experience of living a more spiritual and present life. It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.
I do meet people from my act from time to time, They give me a little flicker of worry - 'Have I been unfair?' But I'm usually talking about a greater narrative or a scene. I'm not just destroying them personally, The Cheryl Cole bit isn't about Cheryl Cole so much as our tendency as a celebrity-consuming culture to put people on a pedestal just for what they look like. It's about us and how quickly we shift in terms of approval or disapproval.
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