Minnie Driver > Quotes

“Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing – that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls – it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness’ sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad – let it be both.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Never underestimate the stories people tell themselves about how much better someone else’s life is.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“I suddenly realized that circumstances are not weight-bearing. They do not create a structure upon which to safely build your life. Circumstances can change in an instant. And that shifting can stop plans from manifesting. My plan was now just an idea that apparently had run its course. So what was I supposed to do now that I’d done everything I thought I was supposed to do?”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“No, getting lost in whatever you’re personally going through at the expense of your performance. Use it, don’t telegraph it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“No one tells you how birth and death are so closely aligned. Here, lying in the dark, I see it: pain, a journey that goes toward only one thing and the deep need to have someone with you to hold onto. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the "end" - never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops. Infinite human experience of beginning and ending, so deeply connected, only one instilling fear.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“The thing about being someone else for a living is that you (the actual person you are) run the risk of being discarded in favor of the shiny new mantle you are paid to step into. It offers a real possibility of having yourself described not just by the characters you play, but also by the inattention to your inner self. It felt dangerous and delicious to think of never having to excavate my own inner landscape in favor of ephemera.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“I looked at the tall man through the rearview mirror—newly heroic and cheerfully crushed into my tiny car—and I knew that I loved him. Hot on the heels of this realization was the accompanying acknowledgment that it did not take a great deal for me to fall in love. Being defended, considerateness, a train door held open, making room on a crowded pub bench—these things regularly not only triggered my devotion, they also were watertight assurances of my lifelong happiness with this new stranger. The thing was, I was completely aware of how nuts it was to feel a whole life together on the back of a kind word, but it never stopped me from falling in love. As a truly terrible person I once fell in love with said when I told him I first loved him after he’d given me a lift home: “That’s not just nuts, it’s also crazy.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Kathleen Turner’s”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“It is an existential corridor where I’m not tethered to who I was on departure or who I’ll be when I land. The pressure of expectation is released. That’s not to say I want to run naked down the aisle and grab a drinks trolley from the galley, but rather that all the myriad interactions with life are put on hold. It is the relaxation of an exhale of a pause. I am anyone here.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“I was beginning to see that the greatest difference between adults and children was that they had to provide answers whereas we could just ask questions. Imagine having to know everything. It felt like a burden I couldn’t imagine ever wanting. Also, answers felt so finite; they left no possibility of a surprise ending—they closed the door that a question had opened. I really liked asking questions and always enjoyed the conversations they elicited more than the answer. I would have liked to have had the conversation with my father about why he needed to send me away. I didn’t need to know the actual reason per se, I just wanted to hear the question out loud and see what he did with it. Maybe he had some questions of his own, maybe if he asked a few more of them out loud, the questions themselves would interrogate the reality, giving it context and the space to settle. Maybe then he wouldn’t have had to come up with answers that left both of us so far away from each other.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“What impossible nonsense has been thrown at women down through the ages, and how tirelessly do they continue to rise to the challenge.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Everything is two things, I think, or even more than two things. I feel happy and sad about being here at this school, there are people who love the idea of the new road and people who hate it, I am consistently both pissing people off and making them laugh.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“We all pretend until the pretense becomes practiced and, I suppose, looks like reality”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“until all that was left was the one hot truth, that beyond the horizon there’s just more horizon. There is no THERE there.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“Wherever possible, when there’s likelihood of water being present, hot or cold weather, fancy party or picnic—I will wear a swimsuit under my clothes. It starts out as a practicality when you grow up part of the time in a hot country. It ends up being comforting. If there’s the ocean or a river or a pool, I will always be able to find a way to excuse myself and jump in. People don’t think you’re trying to get away from them when you go for a swim. They think you’re healthy, strong, secure in how your body looks stripped down. If the weather is cold or raining, they think you’re brave. They do not know that water is my escape hatch, the perfect distraction from my anxiety in the shape of a cool gesture.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“It was very peaceful until an actress I vaguely recognized started wailing about being fat. “Oh, you’re not fat, you’re pregnant,” cooed a few of the other women. “How am I ever going to get cast in anything when I’ve got a giant ass and a baby?” She was pretty and blond, but her petulant shaming of her body was disfiguring.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“The solution to a problem is never commensurate with the size of the problem.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“I think again of that thing no one tells you about birth, that as your body offers up your child to the outside world your very first job as a mother is to let go. I really never thought about the fact that that gift, if you're lucky, needs to be returned in kind.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“No one tells you how birth and death are so closely aligned. Here, lying in the dark, I see it: pain, a journey that goes toward only one thing and the deep need to have someone with you to hold on to. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the “end”—never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops. Infinite human experience of beginning and ending, so deeply connected, only one instilling fear. I am not frightened anymore. We are on an adventure, and this is not some eleventh-hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination. We are together, this person who was my portal into life. This rare, funny, independent creature who would do the same for me: walk with me as far as she could and then wave me off with love, safe in the knowledge that life had equipped me with everything I needed to meet death as the newest of my many experiences.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin. Make gravy you don’t remember, live while you’re dying, fight the unassailable.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“In a way, it was the perfect vengeance to wreak on a cheating lover; yoked to their deeds and betrayal, they drag those things on into the next version of their life and relationships, hopefully feeling like there’s never quite enough room to exist comfortably next to them, always having to manage a pinch of compression. The abandoned is gifted with emptiness. No secrets or remains to awkwardly accommodate, and once the ash is swept, a clear offering to a new beginning. I had questions, though.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Lauren Bacall.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Exiting through the doors of the hospital feels like stepping from inside into another inside. There is no stepping outside this experience, I feel quite clearly that I am still in the room with Mum, even as I stand in the rain. We are hermetically sealed into this other reality; we don’t leave it until it’s really time to go. Until the door appears. I think about the Helen Keller quote we only ever say part of, When one door closes, another one opens. That’s what we all say; the actual quote is: When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. I walk down the street in my bubble; amazing to be in two places at once. When the door opens I think, I will try to keep looking at it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Women sit on the edge with their legs dangling in the water while their children scream “MOM! Watch THIS” and then proceed to perform no particular feat beyond splashing around, illustrating something I have always known, which is that 90 percent of good parenting is bearing witness.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“A woman never steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and she is not the same woman.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“I’m sorry, darling. What are you sorry about? Being a shit mother. This is something she has said and worried about my whole adult life. Sometimes she makes herself a victim of the thought and sometimes it carries a deep plea for forgiveness. I had always been exasperated by the statement and felt it asked me to repeatedly qualify that there had been shit moments of selfishness that accompany any human, mother or not, but that she, in all honesty, was not a shit mother. There are clearly certain thoughts that keep playing through a life, though, like songs on repeat. They are for you, and you alone and however much you try to involve other people in them, they really have nothing to do with anyone but yourself. Here, in whatever end-of-life moment we are in, it is suddenly necessary to lay those thoughts to rest. Take the stylus off the record, delete the playlist. There’s nothing to be sorry about, Mum. So what if you were, what if it were true? Does it matter? Because here we are together, talking . . . together. I love you and more than that, I know I love you, and I see who we are together—we laugh a lot, you are who I want to call when things are bad or good or interesting. So how can you being a shit mother really be something that carries any weight in terms of what it did to me, your child?—It didn’t. Which makes me think you weren’t, or at least, not entirely. She has fallen asleep, but she is smiling. I think even though it was a bit of a ramble, I made a good point. In making it, I realize I absolutely mean it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“Grown ups are an absolute mystery, and I had found that if I just took them at face value and didn't get involved in their motivations, their personal shit would always be recognizable as something that belonged to them and had nothing to do with me.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

“I wonder if, when teaching something as ephemeral as acting, you have to do this, and that building a scaffold around a muse is how you tether yourself to her. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize how much of what they taught was mulled with this secret knowledge, only relayed in the last moments of their teaching: That for all your adherence to discipline, your observance of the rules of iambic pentameter and how to sit down while wearing a sword without crushing your balls—the chances of you making a living as an actor are cadaverously slim.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays