"You never know what motivates you"
About this Quote
A line like "You never know what motivates you" lands with the quiet authority of someone who’s spent a lifetime being watched, judged, and categorized. Coming from Cicely Tyson, it reads less like a tidy self-help slogan and more like a wary admission: the story we tell about our ambition is usually the sanitized version.
The intent is to puncture the myth of the perfectly planned career. Tyson’s public narrative is often framed in terms of purpose and principle: choosing roles that refused caricature, insisting on dignity, carrying the burden of representation in an industry that routinely denied it. This quote complicates that heroic arc. It suggests that even the most disciplined choices can be propelled by forces you wouldn’t put in a press junket: fear, anger, pride, hunger, a need to prove someone wrong, the ache of being underestimated.
The subtext is about opacity - not just to outsiders, but to yourself. Motivation isn’t a single clean engine; it’s a tangle of survival instincts and private history. For a Black woman actor coming of age in mid-century America, that tangle is political whether or not she wants it to be. Sometimes you’re "motivated" by art. Sometimes by the narrowing of options. Sometimes by the sheer refusal to disappear.
It works because it refuses the easy moral. Tyson isn’t offering certainty; she’s offering realism. The candor is its edge: the confession that even integrity has roots you may not fully understand.
The intent is to puncture the myth of the perfectly planned career. Tyson’s public narrative is often framed in terms of purpose and principle: choosing roles that refused caricature, insisting on dignity, carrying the burden of representation in an industry that routinely denied it. This quote complicates that heroic arc. It suggests that even the most disciplined choices can be propelled by forces you wouldn’t put in a press junket: fear, anger, pride, hunger, a need to prove someone wrong, the ache of being underestimated.
The subtext is about opacity - not just to outsiders, but to yourself. Motivation isn’t a single clean engine; it’s a tangle of survival instincts and private history. For a Black woman actor coming of age in mid-century America, that tangle is political whether or not she wants it to be. Sometimes you’re "motivated" by art. Sometimes by the narrowing of options. Sometimes by the sheer refusal to disappear.
It works because it refuses the easy moral. Tyson isn’t offering certainty; she’s offering realism. The candor is its edge: the confession that even integrity has roots you may not fully understand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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