Daily Inspiration Quote by Ava DuVernay

DuVernay isn’t talking about “representation” as a polite add-on; she’s talking about power: who gets to become an icon in the first place, and who’s been systematically denied that symbolic permanence. “Creating new icons” is a deliberately muscular phrasing. Icons aren’t just characters on a screen. They’re shortcuts in the culture’s brain, the images that get recycled into posters, Halloween costumes, classroom lessons, and default assumptions about heroism and history. If you control those images, you control what feels inevitable.

The second sentence sharpens the mission into a rebuttal. “We’re here” sounds present-tense and urgent, the language of protest and visibility. Then she snaps it backward: “We’ve always been here.” That pivot is the subtext. It’s not a request to be included; it’s an indictment of the systems - Hollywood, textbooks, news cycles - that have treated Black life and other marginalized lives as newly discovered content, rather than foundational reality. DuVernay refuses the myth that progress arrives when the gatekeepers finally “allow” someone in.

As a director, she’s also speaking about form, not just politics. New icons require new frames: whose faces get close-ups, whose interiority gets time, who gets complexity without being made “relatable” to a presumed white audience. The line reads like a creative brief and a cultural correction at once: make images that can’t be un-seen, and make them sturdy enough to outlast the moment that demanded them.