Smollett Jurnee Quotes & Sayings

There are so many people who will try and make you feel like your opinion doesn't matter, and I've learned how important it is to use your voice. — Jurnee Smollett

I am oftentimes the ear for some people that I know and love. Which I like being. I don't know if I'd like being a marriage counselor, though, because that's too deep for me. — Jurnee Smollett

You go through those awkward, dorky, geeky stages, and growing up in the industry amplifies all that. Fortunately, I have a mother who encouraged me to build my confidence from within and embrace my imperfections. — Jurnee Smollett

There's a level of shame attached to our history, and we need to replace that shame with pride and own our history. These are our superheroes. These are our people, and I would love to see us own this side of our history with pride. — Jurnee Smollett

When I was younger, I really struggled with confidence. — Jurnee Smollett

I love music, and I love drumlines. I like school bands a lot. There's nothing wrong with cheerleading, but I'd rather be a band geek. It's a little more interesting. — Jurnee Smollett

I just live my life. I go where I feel God is calling me. — Jurnee Smollett

For me, seeing our history told in this light, the ones who did rebel, the ones who did revolt, the revolutionaries, excited me. Seeing this story of the Underground Railroad ... and that is such a proud part of our history that not a lot of us know about, where these brave men and women, they were heroes, really helped tear down the system of slavery just by running. — Jurnee Smollett

I try to give each performance my own soul, to bring a truth to my character. Hopefully, when I bring that much truth to a character, it resonates with somebody, and it sparks some kind of emotion in them. — Jurnee Smollett

I come from a family of four brothers, so I like sports. — Jurnee Smollett

Fortunately, I come from an activist mother, so I didn't have to rely on the history books. The history books teach us nothing about the Underground Railroad aside from Harriet Tubman. So I knew more about it but, obviously, I had to dig deeper and expand my knowledge and do a lot of research once I took this project on. I had, like, a good two months to research before we started shooting, which isn't a lot, and I continued it throughout the five months of us shooting. — Jurnee Smollett

Fundamentalists can't take a joke. Ever. They want us to blindly obey, parrot everything they do, and believe in their dogmas. — Shahin Najafi

Old customs are easy to forget with the flashing of events in our lives. Easy to forget, like the heavy clothing we once wore to survive the winters. It is an old custom, the handing down of things. A good knife, a well-made pipe, a heavy robe. Tradition falls prey to constant change, and creativity becomes so revered that the past is a relic, only to be admired. But in this coat, I was held to the earth, pulled to the past by its weight. — Craig Childs

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running. — Victoria Nelson

I'm a grandma at heart. — Jurnee Smollett

My little brothers loved baseball. I'm not as big on that as basketball or football, but I understand the game. — Jurnee Smollett

Vanessa Williams in person is like ... the camera cannot capture how gorgeous this woman is! She is just so breathtaking. — Jurnee Smollett

Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity. — Norman Doidge

But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book. — Jurnee Smollett

I have so many passions outside of my passion for acting. — Jurnee Smollett

It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree. — Philip Roth

Everyone has a past, but I try not to let that affect the way I see them; I want to get to know who they are today. — Jurnee Smollett

I like sitting down and watching games. — Jurnee Smollett

One of the most tragic things about slavery was the mental enslavement, the way they made us believe that we were worth nothing; and that's what she's fighting against. — Jurnee Smollett

Never let anyone silence your voice. — Jurnee Smollett

I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge. — Jurnee Smollett

I don't really think about the critics or the commercial success. — Jurnee Smollett

My best advice would be that you have to be vulnerable with each other. Like, everyone says you have to be honest, you have to communicate; like, yes, of course, but you gotta be willing to be vulnerable. — Jurnee Smollett

Maybe you should think about the choices in your life, how someone can come and spit some kind of game to you and make you doubt every single thing that is your life, your relationship, your appearance, your job, your ambitions, your marriage, and how those thoughts can lead to choices and behavior that you never thought that you were capable of. — Jurnee Smollett

Our way of eating and producing food can be very violent, to other species, to our own bodies, and to the Earth. Or our way of growing, distributing, and eating food can be part of creating a larger healing. We get to choose. The — Thich Nhat Hanh

As an artist, you want to stretch. That's the only way you're going to grow. If I stay inside my comfort zone, do roles that I've done before, then I'm never going to get better as an actress. — Jurnee Smollett

The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things. — Melissa Febos