Jennifer Beals Quotes

I don’t know that I’ve ever fit in, ever. And I say that not in a bad way. I mean, in some ways, it’s a relief not to fit in, because you get to look at different sides equally. Like I don’t know that I have always found my tribe. My tribe are the people who don’t feel like they fit in. And frankly, I think that a lot of people don’t feel like they fit in.

“I’ve had my letters from klansmen, believe me...I could always navigate it. I don’t know if that’s just because I was conditioned to navigate it. But I always could. It just made me determined to work even more...Every single thing is narrative. Our understanding of things is a narrative. It’s the narrative of who’s in power. It’s the narrative of the person in the bodega down the street. What is the story that I’m telling myself? Am I telling myself the story that my teachers told me that I was? Am I telling myself the story that my parents told me that I was? How do I come to the narrative that serves my highest good?

[Regarding Flashdance-related fame] It was very clear to me that it’s not real. It’s not real…I was never the little girl who thought I wanted to be famous. My first real quest that I can recall…other than wanting to be a jockey…was trying to figure out who or what God was. That really drove me for quite some time…I had a notion that there was this mystery that I didn’t really know anything about, and I wanted to try to figure it out….so fame was not my driving force.

...[B]eing part of The L Word made me realize how much more television can be that what I had experienced in my lifetime in terms of being able to be of service to people. I had so many fans come up to me who were really deeply appreciative of the show and what it had meant for them and their own sense of identity and their own sense of inclusion in our society and in our culture.

[On how she goes about trying to live authentically] Well really listening to my point of view and if I am on a set, say, that doesn't really value a woman's point of view, regardless of how they feel, continuing to give my point of view and try to find a way to be heard and not diminishing myself because other people are diminishing me. Because that, I think, is the worst temptation — that, you know, you judge yourself by how others are judging you, and to fall into that trap is to walk into the realm of self-annihilation.

Love is the most dangerous thing in the world.

It behooves all of us to have everyone experience their deepest, most beautiful, most profound and powerful self, because those people are more apt to give their gift to everyone else rather than shudder in fear.

Women are so often segregated to their sexuality, and how they appear. In fact, there’s a lot of talk, even now, I think in most jobs this is true…people will say, when a woman rises to power, they ask, ‘who did she sleep with?’ You know, it couldn’t possibly be about her acumen, it couldn’t possibly be about her intelligence. It’s got to be about her body, because that’s how women get ahead.

[Regarding how the L Word change how she selects her roles] I really have a lot less tolerance for being subjugated to simply being the emotional center of a story, rather than being the active portion of the plot. It's as if women can't drive the action so often in stories. I don't know who made up that rule but it can get very frustrating if there's not more to play.

What’s shocking is to see six-year-old children jump roping in the street at 2:00 a.m.—that’s shocking—a block away from drug dealers. Just to see that the gap in the circle is education, in my mind, primarily for young women, because it’s the young women that are raising the kids and that’s where the circle, I think, perpetuates itself.

I was never that kid practising an acceptance speech in the mirror, holding an award. I was the kid who wanted to know, who was God? What is God? That was my obsession. I mailed away for catechism lessons from an advertisement in the back of the Silver Surfer comic, but that wasn’t what I meant. Then I started collecting Bibles. Then I moved on to tarot cards. My mom was just horrified. Cut to two years from now – I’ll have started a religion based on Star Wars.

[On what she learned from working on The L Word] I think that I learned the most clearly was how connected we all are. And that (does air quotation marks) "gay issues" are also women's issues because homophobia is a form of misogyny…And I feel much more motivated to speak out when I see something that I don't like or that just smells wrong…I see how all women are connected. You know, and that we are all either repressed or we repress ourselves in certain ways, and that's truly codified within the culture. And that I'm not so far removed from that woman in the Congo who's terrified to go out into the woods to look for firewood.

[On dealing with physical and emotional pain] … a friend taught me before I gave birth…“don't try to take your mind away from the pain. Go right into the centre of the pain”, because when she did that she found the pain dissipated. It's true for me anyway, but it's not always possible, I admit. It has become a valuable exercise to apply to different things in life, of not avoiding or disregarding pain or bad feelings. I just have to remember that nothing in life is ever stagnant and that this grief or ache is going to change because everything in life changes.

[On meditation] ...that's the single most important thing that I do...there's something about understanding who you truly are. The essence of everyone is so beautiful that it's startling.

I’m not always really calm, but I try not to get taken away by things that are incredibly transitory.