Just as I Am Quotes

“You always seek to control others when you are not in full ownership of yourself.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“You'll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse,' Denzel Washington often said as we worked together on 'Fences.' 'I don't care how much money you have or what level of notoriety you've achieved, you can't take any of it with you.' There is a cap on earthly success, a ceiling on the amount of joy that possessions and awards can bring before disillusionment sets in. Our appearance, our prosperity, the applause: all of it is so fleeting. But a life of true significance has unlimited impact. It is measured in how well we've loved those around us, how much we've given away, how many seeds we've sown along our path. During her ninety-six years, Ms. [Cicely] Tyson has discovered the potent elixir: she has lived a life of that is bigger than she is, an existence grounded in purpose and flourishing in service to others. That is her defining masterpiece. That is her enduring gift to us all.

[Viola Davis, Foreword]”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“I stand amazed at this tree, this life. I stare up in awe at its branches, raising up toward heaven. I wonder about its origins, how a seed so miniscule could grow into a structure so vast and resilient. I'm still examining its genesis. To examine, to question, to discover and evolve--that is what it means to be alive. The day we cease to explore is the day we begin to wilt. I share my testimony in these pages not because I have reached any lasting conclusions, but because I have so much to understand. I am as inquisitive about life now as I was as a child. My story will never be finished, nor should it be. For as long as God grants me breath, I will be living--and writing--my next chapter.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Knowing your generational story firms the ground upon which you stand. It makes your life, your struggles and triumphs, bigger than your lone existence. It connects you to a grand plotline.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“To soar toward what's possible, you must leave behind what's comfortable.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“What’s for you in this life, you will get. And what is not for you, you will never get. Do you hear me?”
― Cicely Tyson, Just As I Am

“When you don't know your true value, you see the world through the lens of how you don't measure up.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Healing, as I see it, is not the absence of pain. Rather it is a gradual reduction in the ache. The lessening of that hurt eventually makes room for fond memories to surface.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“As life has taught me time and again, you often have to lose your present circumstance to make room for your forthcoming one.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Anger would've been the justified response, and for a time in private, I was certainly apoplectic. But as life has taught me more than once, resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“I never leave home without my cayenne pepper. I either stash a bottle of the liquid extract in my pocket book or I stick it in the shopping cart I pull around with me all over Manhattan. When it comes to staying right side up in this world, a black woman needs at least three things. The first is a quiet spot of her own, a place away from the nonsense. The second is a stash of money, like the cash my mother kept hidden in the slit of her mattress. The last is several drops of cayenne pepper, always at the ready. Sprinkle that on your food before you eat it and it’ll kill any lurking bacteria. The powder does the trick as well, but I prefer the liquid because it hits the bloodstream quickly. Particularly when eating out, I won’t touch a morsel to my lips ‘til it’s speckled with with cayenne. That’s just one way I take care of my temple, aside from preparing my daily greens, certain other habits have carried me toward the century mark.

First thing I do every morning is drink four glasses of water. People think this water business is a joke. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. I’ve known two elderly people who died of dehydration, one of whom fell from his bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand up because he was so parched.

Following my water, I drink 8 ounces of fresh celery blended in my Vita-mix. The juice cleanses the system and reduces inflammation. My biggest meal is my first one: oatmeal. I soak my oats overnight so that when I get up all I have to do is turn on the burner. Sometimes I enjoy them with warm almond milk, other times I add grated almonds and berries, put the mixture in my tumbler and shake it until it’s so smooth I can drink it. In any form, oats do the heart good.

Throughout the day I eat sweet potatoes, which are filled with fiber, beets sprinkled with a little olive oil, and vegetables of every variety. I also still enjoy plenty of salad, though I stopped adding so many carrots – too much sugar. But I will do celery, cucumbers, seaweed grass and other greens. God’s fresh bounty doesn’t need a lot of dressing up, which is why I generally eat my salad plain. From time to time I do drizzle it with garlic oil. I love the taste.

I also love lychee nuts. I put them in the freezer so that when I bite into them cold juice comes flooding out. As terrific as they are, I buy them only once in awhile. I recently bit into an especially sweet one, and then I stuck it right back in the freezer. “Not today, Suzie,” I said to myself, “full of glucose!”

I try never to eat late, and certainly not after nine p.m. Our organs need a chance to rest. And before bed, of course, I have a final glass of water. I don’t mess around with my hydration.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“…when parents think they're protecting their children by withholding the truth. They are in fact exposing them to heartache.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Embedded in this woman’s observation was an assumption that lives at the center of all bias: You are not like me. You are intrinsically different. And that difference deems you inferior.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just As I Am

“No amount of black girl magic, no repeated proclamations of our worth can fully treat the wound – although acknowledging its persistence is a beginning. The ultimate remedy, as I see it is supernatural. I look daily toward heaven for restoration, for spiritual healing. My true identity isn’t rooted in our history, grievous and glorious as it is. It is grounded in my designation as a Child of God, the Daughter of the Great Physician. In His care I find my cure.

My hope for you is the same one I carry for myself. I pray that amid the heartache of our ancestry you can grant yourself the grace so seldom extended to us. I pray that you can pass that compassion on to your children and to their children so that it slathers comfort on our sore spots. I pray that, as a people, we can give ourselves a soft place to land. I pray even as we rightly express our fury as being regarded as sub-human, that we don’t dwell in that space. That we don’t allow anger to poison our spirits. That we embrace love as our One True Antidote. I hope, too, that you recognize your specialness, the distinctiveness the Creator has imbued us with. I see you as clearly as history has, and in unison with it, I nod. I know that swivel in your hips, that fervor in your testimony, that ebullience in your stride, that flair in your song. The fact that others are constantly trying to diminish you, ever attempting to dismiss your talents even as they mimic you, is proof of your uniqueness! No one bothers to undermine you unless they recognize your brilliance.

More than anything, I pray that you can carve out a purpose for yourself, a calling beyond your own survival, a sweet offering to the world. You gain a life by giving yours away. Not everyone is meant to raise a picket sign, and yet each of us can choose a path of impact. Rearing your children with affection and warmth is a form of activism. Honoring your word impeccably is a way to raise your voice. Performing your job with excellence, with your chin high and your standards higher is as powerful as any protest march. Sowing into the lives of young people is a worthy crusade. That is what it means to leave this world of ours more lit up than we found it. It’s also what it means to lead a magnificent life, even if an unlikely one.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“We each have many faces, various ways of appearing and behaving. In one moment, we may show remarkable steadfastness, and in another, an aching vulnerability. We can be at turns tranquil and belligerent, jubilant and despairing. We are inherently multifaceted and yet marvelously complete.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Over and over in our world, we have witnessed how today's riches can become tomorrow's scarcity. We'd do well to heed the lesson. In times of plenty, paucity sits by, licking its lips and awaiting its next grand appearance.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“That is, in this life, who we are for one another--fellow sojourners and witnesses. We are here to see and hear one another.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“We may never realize the extent to which our behaviors impact our children, how they seek validation in our every word and smile, gaze and gesture.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Several years before Maya [Angelou] went home to heaven, she penned the poem popularly known as 'When Great Trees Fall,' but properly titled 'Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield,' a lyrical ode she ends this way:

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly....

Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

Her sentiments, so often repeated, powerfully sum up what loss does to the human heart, how it lowers our heads and deepens our sorrows, and yet how, in the end, it miraculously restores us. When great trees fall, we weep in unity with the forest--and we rejoice at the legacy that lingers.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“When you bury a parent, you lower his or her casket into the ground, but the history between you lives on. The funeral is an ending, yes, but it is also a beginning - the start of a true reckoning with those hurts between you that must be laid to rest. When we buried my mother, I mourned her then and in the years that followed. As I grieved, I thought I'd long since come to terms with my father - with how he'd both delighted and failed me, with the ways in which he'd unknowingly bruised me just as all parents do, despite their best intentions.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Nearly all parents I know can sum up their aspirations for their children in one word: better.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“Turning a blind eye to our history has not saved us from its consequences.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“The most potent antidote to reticence is survival.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“To be seen in this life, truly observed without judgment, is what it feels like to be loved.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“But when the people who gave you life have departed this earth, you enter a strange new corridor of detachment. You are untethered, disconnected from the two story lines that gave birth to your one.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“America has our blood on its palms, our flesh between its teeth. When you come to understand what we have endured, when you let the barefaced savagery of it all truly penetrate, you are forever haunted by the horror.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just As I Am

“You don't have to be touched to be emotionally robbed.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“When you give yourself away, when you surrender yourself as a divine vessel, … you impact lives eternally.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am