More Quotes by Viola Davis
We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.
We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
When your passion and drive are bigger than your fears, you just dive.
They say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too.
You have two stark choices when you find yourself in a really desperate situation. You can either fold and cave-in to it or you can become really passionate about getting out of it. When you're really passionate, you're going to grab hold of every rope you see, and wrap them around your arms and legs to claw your way out. And that's the way I've felt in my life.
At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes. But when you hit a wall in your personal life, and you screw up, people don't give you a chance to navigate your way through it and tap into what's extraordinary about you.
There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.
I just look at women sometimes and I just want to ask them, "Do you know how fabulous you are?"
It would be great to bust through and make history. But what's more important is the opportunity to continue to get roles that are complicated and wonderful, to be a part of the narrative and to get to do what our counterparts are able to do. It doesn't just stop at holding an award.
You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny.
