Bryan Cranston: A Life in Parts

I’m a man on a mission these days, a mission to underline all of my favourite quotes from the books I read. This is my ‘Underline’ series where I share those quotes with y’all. 

PS: I underline in pencil of course, I’m not a monster.

This post is all about my favourite quotes from Bryan Cranston’s book, ‘A Life in Parts’. 

Enjoy! 🙂

• “Actors are storytellers and storytelling is the essential human art. It’s how we understand who we are.”

• “That captured my imagination: swinging for the impossible, shooting the moon.”

• “Don’t you want to know her first? Sure, but the weather is warm, there’s an ocean breeze and she’s wearing a bikini. What else do I need to know? I fell in and out of love several times over the course of a summer.”

• “I occasionally wonder if some of the couples I married are still together and it
  suddenly dawns on them: ‘Holy shit! Honey, I think Walter White married us!

• “Was I really supposed to kiss her? Really? I went to the teacher and whispered ‘it says the couple is making out…should we really, uh, make out, or just pretend to do it?’

  A valid question, I thought.
  The teacher didn’t think so and dismissed me: ‘You’re not in high school anymore.’

  Message received. I had to go for it.”

• “Indifference was my go-to whenever I felt vulnerable. I was not mature enough to be honest and show surprise, even though that was my feeling.”

• “A month later I wouldn’t remember her name. But she left me with something I’d never forget: I learned you could so fully inhabit a character that you could fool others, move others.

  With talent and commitment, you could seduce or terrify. You could make someone feel utter hate or desolation or compassion or even love.”

• “Being on the road simplified things in some ways, but complicated them in others. There’s no complacency on the road. We always had to be aware, we became experts at recognizing potentially dangerous situations.

  Still, for every danger, there was a delight. Every face you see is a new one. Adventure and surprise are right around the next corner.”

• “The greatest thing about youth is that you’re not yet battle-weary, so you’ll try anything.”

• “I knew at that moment, lying inside a sleeping bag in a pup tent under a shelter on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia: I was going to be an actor.”

• “At that precise moment, I conjured up a credo that would guide me for the rest of my life: ‘I will pursue something that I love – and hopefully become good at it, instead of pursuing something that I’m good at – but didn’t love'”

• “It was all I had in my hip pocket, so I gave it a shot.”

• “I guarded against becoming a great classroom actor. Whenever I felt I was one of the best actors in a class, I left to find another one where I wasn’t.”

• “The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.”

• “Most  of those guys hated their jobs, and probably hated their lives. It would be so easy to be sucked into that despair. But I didn’t allow that to come inside. It wasn’t welcome.
  I wasn’t going to let them clutter my brain. I had something real to hold on to.”

• “I looked at the blood. I felt how tenuous the boundary is between life and its opposite. I felt how limited our span is, and hoe easily squandered. I felt the need to embrace life. Put my arms around it.”

• “Some actors complained about mild inconveniences like early start times, and I remember Lloyd Bridges said ‘Better than digging a ditch’.

  That left an impression on me. He was the star, and he was appreciative. I remember thinking: ‘That’s how I want to be.’, and indeed I was grateful to be there, and it wasn’t digging ditch.”

• “The only way to get lucky is to be prepared for luck to find you.”
  
• “He fired me and I actually THANKED him. Damn, I wish I hadn’t done that.”
  
• “Everyone needs a champion, and Linwood Boomer was mine.”
• “When we finished that last take [on Malcolm in the Middle], not one member of the cast or crew had a dry eye. Seven years. We had become a family and we didn’t want to let it go.”
• Aaron Paul was a shiny-eyed kid in his mid-twenties when I first met him. He was a puppy. He was attentive and playful and honest and present and vulnerable and richly talented.

  As our dynamic within the story line varied and evolved, we became even tighter outside of work. That ‘Breaking Bad’ ride bonded us deeply. He’s a friend for life.”

• “I want to know that I took full advantage of my good fortune. Even if I make mistakes along the way. I’d rather fail than regret.”
• “On a break, I asked the same question that everyone asks Warren Buffet: ‘What’s our secret?’

  ‘Oh, it’s no secret,’ he said in his affable homespun way, ‘just make more right decisions than wrong ones and you’ll be fine.'”

• “You’ve got to fail, or risk failure, to learn, to succeed. You’ve got to be hungry.”
• “I always encouraged Taylor to wander, to feel it’s okay not to know exactly where you are. Figuring it out builds confidence.”
• “Go ahead, get lost, It’s okay to be afraid. Being afraid can actually be a sign you’re doing something worthwhile.”
• “I took three deep breaths. I shook those breaths into my body. And then I relaxed, I let it go. I went to take my place.

I’m a man on a mission these days, a mission to underline all of my favourite quotes from the books I read. This is my ‘Underline’ series where I share those quotes with y’all. 

PS: I underline in pencil of course, I’m not a monster.

This post is all about my favourite quotes from Mitch Albom’s book, ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’.

Enjoy! 🙂

• “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
• “Every life has one true-love snapshot.”
• “But as she walked away, she turned and waved. That was the snapshot. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.
• “No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”
• “The running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.”
• “People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.”
• “Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.”
• “There are norandom acts. We are all connected. You can no more seperateone life from another than you can seperate a breeze from the wind.”
• “Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”
• No life is a waste,” the Blue Man. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking that we are alone.”
• “As always with Marguerite, Eddie mostly wants to freeze time.”
• “War had crawled inside of Eddie, in his leg and his soul. He learned many things as a soldier. He came home a different man.”
• “In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he’s praying in a foxhole.”
• “Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”
• “The Capt grinned. ‘The way I see it, that’s what we’re getting here soldier. That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.'”
• “You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big Sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.”
• “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
• “You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.”
• “He sat down in his life. And there he remained.”
• “Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death? Eddie shrugged. “Better,” she said, “to be loyal to one another.”
• “Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade and the harm we do, we do to ourselves.”
• “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it. You made me love you and all the time you knew it, and all the time you knew it.”
• “The secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”