Best 75 quotes of Brit Marling on MyQuotes

A couple of compromises in a row and suddenly you're very far way from the person you thought you were.

A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

Any man worth his salt loves a feminist. Only men who are afraid of the feminine in themselves are afraid of women.

As an actor, you have an accumulated knowledge base. But there's also something about it that every time you really feel like you're doing it for the first time; you have no idea whether you're capable of it.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.

Being a waitress can be a very brutal job sometimes, and I remember during the training, the person said to me, "The redder the lips, the better the tips," and that was like the only advice she gave me.

But, it has something to do with having belief in a human future and what that human future is. What is the future of humanity? How does this whole experiment not self-destruct with the environment and everything else going on?

Early rejections are really tough, especially when all of your friends who you went to school with now have legitimate jobs, are getting married, having children, buying real estate, being adults. And you're still trying to figure out how to make a living doing the thing you think you love, but you're not even sure yet because you haven't even done it. It was a long road of risk and treachery.

Eventually, if you're the train that's leaving the station, people will race to catch up with you. I think that's one of the things I've figured out. You can't wait for permission to act, you just do; then people are like, "Oh, look at that person just doing over there. Maybe I'll come join them.

For me, fantasy and speculative science fiction are the genres that feel closest to how I feel about being alive. Like, when I feel the most invigorated by just even a walk down the block in twilight, when the street lamps are just coming on and there's mist and some shadowy thing in silhouette in a window, I naturally invest all of those things with deep mythology and mystery and meaning. I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don't.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.

Here's the thing that I think about life - if you manage to get into a space where you don't need that much, where the overhead of your life is not that great and you're pretty happy and relaxed without that much stuff, you are really liberated because you never have to say yes to something because you want another refrigerator or car!

Human beings are flawed and complicated and messy.

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

I believe in what science fiction can do, which is it can set up simple rules that it has to follow to try to illuminate something about the present that is somewhat invisible to us.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

I didn't understand how you could be an actor if you didn't also study philosophy and study political science, astronomy. And also just go out and live life and have experiences.

I'd love to do anything that is outside of my comfort zone, that I've never done before. Whenever I think about something that I want to take on, I like it if it makes me a bit nervous, or makes me feel like I don't know exactly that I can pull it off.

I'd studied theater growing up and loved that, but didn't have many examples of artists around me.

I feel like developing the muscle of my imagination became a way to survive reality.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet.

I feel like, when the audience connects with something, they enjoy the experience so much that they want other people to go have it. They're like, "Don't talk about it. Don't tell. Just go!" It's a nice feeling to have people coming around it that way, protecting the ideas in it, so that everyone can see it for themselves.

If you came from the future and you arrived here, what would you be like? Would your immune system be depressed from that travel? Would you be well? Would you be ill? Would you be affected by micro-organisms of the time period and be hiding out in a basement? How would it all work, practically?

I get uncomfortable when people give me presents and watch me open them. I don't have birthday parties, because the idea of a group of people singing and looking at me while I'm blowing out candles gives me hives.

I learned from my parents the idea that, if you are devoted enough and you want to study something enough, you can really teach yourself anything.

I'm really into rocks. I have a really serious rock collection. Rocks and feathers and shells and strange found things in nature. I have a lot of those kinds of collections.

I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.

Is there anything worse than being called the 'It Girl?' By definition, there will be a new one in two weeks.

It doesn't happen all the time, but in the moments where you really lose yourself and you fall into this character, it's like time travel.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

I think one thing for sure that you learn the more films that you make is how important it is to choose your collaborators.

I think sometimes big budget means explosions! CGI! CGI, the possibilities are so limitless that it begins to be impractical.

I think there is a general unrest or curiosity about what a human future is going to be like, and whether the way we're living is even sustainable.

I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.

I think we're scared of intimacy - all of us, a little bit.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

I think you get to see, through the different cult members, why people are attracted to a group like this. Everyone is there for a different reason and from a different background. That was part of what was interesting for us, in researching cults and exploring it. A lot of this happens in California.

I totally love my job, and I wake up every day basically thinking about how can I do my job better. It never feels like a job. It's hard, and it's exhausting sometimes, but it never feels like - I would do this even if they didn't pay me to do it. That's a pretty amazing feeling.

It seems to be this hot-bed for these ideas and bringing these groups together. You find that the one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're a teenager who has run away from his parents, or a divorcee who lost her husband, is that they all have in common this feeling of searching for a meaning in their lives.

I used to be able to sit in a chair and for four hours straight in a very focused meditative way be in my own world without ay interruption. And now it's like your brain is getting so trained to check your phone, and there is like a dopamine release every time you get a text whether it's a good or a bad one. I'm really worried about what it's doing to our minds.

I've found myself at one in the morning just sitting at my desk spending an hour returning emails from the day until like two in the morning. It's ridiculous, I should be sleeping, or dreaming, or reading a novel.

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

Life is beautiful because it doesn't last.

Living in Cuba made me unafraid of whatever could happen to me.

Maybe the best definition of what a great partnership or great love is when people make each other grow in a better direction than they would have grown on their own.

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics. I'm not one of those people who can just spout off numbers for things, if numbers are thrown at me.