Finding Identity Quotes

'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.

I remember listening to 'Low End Theory': I had been kicked out of high school. I was in GED school in the LES, and all I could do was listen to 'Low End Theory.' I was in a strange time in my life, and 'Low End Theory' kind of defined that time.

As I've gotten older, I've started to find my voice.

Like many kids, I wanted to do my own thing so it wasn't until around the end of high school and start of college that I started to develop my own faith.

I think I went through my phase of feeling sort of invisible when I left my small hometown in Canada and moved to the big city of Vancouver. I kind of had to decide right there in that moment what I was going to do with the rest of my life and make a thousand decisions after finishing high school. Fortunately, I chose acting.

I've never felt at home in Kortedala, or in Gothenburg, so I always felt like I needed to go somewhere and find some kind of perspective on things.

I was a wayward kid, a rambunctious and angry teenager, but I found acting as a fifteen-year-old.

When I was in fifth grade - so, about 11 - my folks moved us to Denmark. And so not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn't even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation.

I've never been able to relate to many people. I've always been the outcast child. I don't follow the rules. That's kind of how I do everything. Through my music, I've found a place in the world where I'm accepted, so I'm happy.

I never felt cool growing up. I was a bit of an outsider, but I discovered theatre very early on, which got me through.

Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

Rio was a period of my life, and then, poof, I'm gone. I was very young living here, just kind of floating. New York was a foundation for everything I do today. Rio was the bridge.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

I am from the bush. The bush did not define me. I did not stay in the bush, but I never forgot where I came from.

I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.

I always had an inferiority complex, like I wasn't good enough. I was shy. But dancing gave me so much joy, and I was good at it. I felt like a whole person because I could dance.

What I am very, very moved and struck by is that so many people in the world are often living a life that they hadn't planned for themselves. And they wake up one day and say, 'Hang on. Who am I? Is this really me? Is this what I really wanted?' And also, 'Can I change it? Have I got the courage to change it?'

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

Well, in Angel of Hope, Amber ends up going in her sister's stead. The focus of that book and the next one coming out, Angel of Love, is how she finds her way out of her sister's shadow and into herself. That's really what those two novels are based on.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

Becoming yourself is really hard and confusing, and it's a process. It's often not cool to be the person who puts themselves out there.

I knew that I had to find my own voice, both figuratively and literally.

I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.

Inglewood for me was where I really found my voice found sort of the core group of friends that I still have to today.