My Favorite Quotes from Kerry Washington’s Memoir Thicker Than Water

I was fascinated by their dance. She was the resistant and resentful snake charmer, and he was her viper prepared to poison. He came home with slurred speech and sour breath, already missing his friends at the bar, the one who never complained and who celebrated his charms. She wrangles his ego, constantly pirouetting through the land mine of its discontent, unclear that she would ever escape it. ~ Page 61

One of the actors on set was gong through a divorce, and he said something about relationships that I will never forget. He admitted to me that he has not always been fully honest in his relationships in the past. He said, “My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.” His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take away from them the very thing that is most important to each of us - the ability to know and trust ourselves. ~ Page 73

Auditioning is one of the areas in my life where I learned the hard way that I needed to take hold of the concept of success and wrangle it away from the grip of others to define it for myself. This may sound strange coming from a person who is considered generally successful, but I don’t do well when my goal is to be liked, loved, popular, or famous. I can’t control what other people think of me, and when I try, even now, I can lose a sense of myself and get pulled back into feelings of fear and weakness, and into the ominous feeling I had growing up that something was wrong, and that the only way to fix it is to be as perfect as possible. Only, as an actor, it’s not just the love of my parents that I am gunning for; it’s the adoration of millions of fans, viewers, followers, and critics. ~ Page 131

When the film wrapped, I went back to the same deli, bought a handful of snacks, offered more cash than was needed, and told the cashier to keep the change. It was my way of repaying my debt without admitting to my crime. ~ Page 175

It was another hint, another cue: The three of them were a family forged to survive the crossing. He had chosen them; they had chosen each other. He may not have been the biological father, but in their journey together, he was the dad. ~Page 305