LeAnn Rimes Quotes

I know, if I would have won 'X-Factor' and if I would have continued in that lane, I would have spiraled out of control. Performing on there was good, but it wasn't me. It was me compromising for the judges, just different people around.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

It wasn't much fun being Charlotte Go-Go. I like being Charlotte Caffey better.

I really didn't find myself… I was trying too hard to be too many things so I wasn't really anything.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

I've spent twenty-eight years doing what everyone around me expected me to do...being what everyone around me has expected me to be. And it's horrid to be someone else's vision of yourself.

Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

I understand that nobody understands me, but I can't be someone I'm not.

I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

You're not going to win by automatically going out there. It's hard to know what people really expect of you, and I've never tried to live up to expectations anyway. That's no way to play baseball.

Ironically, it was because I was raised as a Muslim in the South, that I realised the value in being true to who you really are. I've just got so many things going on inside. I don't know how to resolve all of them other than being true to who I am.

I became so consumed with trying to live up to what the public expected that I lost myself. I don't know of anyone else who can say this.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

What's the greater risk? Letting go of what people think - or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

There's something safe about playing a character, but then it's like, 'Who am I underneath it all?'

Everyone kept telling me, Just be yourself. Be yourself. I kept thinking, there's got to be more to it than that!

Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.

In the very early days of Wham! the attention felt great, but I do wonder how much freedom I gave away by trying to become something I wasn't.

Getting to be authentic is so liberating.

I was encouraged to use my voice and explore my passions outside of the sport. And when I did that, I was finally able to realize my true self-worth. I was more than that of a gymnast.

The hardest thing to have is success, because it seems to tell people what you are. But it doesn't.

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

It's so hard to know where you belong, ever. You have to be yourself and let yourself fall wherever you fall.