#kin

Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage, talking to the audience, looking at them and smiling, that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now, but there are still moments of awkwardness. ↗

— Norah Jones

#always #audience #awkwardness #been #being

I walked in thinking, 'I have ten movies under my belt and now they want me to go back to making commercials?' I said, if I do that, I want it to be funny. ↗

— Orlando Jones

#belt #commercials #funny #go #i

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

That was one of the things that interested me about the character. He doesn't want to be a hero, and has no real desire to save the earth or discover aliens. He's sniffing around looking to see what will fall in his lap. ↗

— Orlando Jones

#around #character #desire #discover #earth

I would like to be a part of a community of women, and help women be empowered, but I think I'm not necessarily political. I say that because I really hate politicians, so I don't fancy sitting around and thinking about them all the time. ↗

— Rickie Lee Jones

#around #because #community #empowered #fancy

I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti. ↗

— Paul Farmer

#easy #forward #haiti #help #i

In college I never realized the opportunities available to a pro athlete. I've been given the chance to meet all kinds of people, to travel and expand my financial capabilities, to get ideas and learn about life, to create a world apart from basketball. ↗

— Michael Jordan

#apart #athlete #available #basketball #been

No, I don't think about the myth of the West. It's not the kind of thinking I do. That's more suited to people who live in big towns on the West Coast or East Coast, people who stay under a roof, in a room, all the time. ↗

— Tommy Lee Jones

#big #coast #east #east coast #i

Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films. ↗

— Philip Kaufman

#adult #america #audience #been #european

I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community. ↗

— Barbara Jordan

#confidence #form #i #kind #national