Evangeline Lilly
Around the time I graduated from high school, I decided better to underachieve and have friendship than to overachieve and be alone.Collection: Friendship
When I got old enough to date, I realized that Valentine's Day is just a commercial marketing scam to make men feel bad. So I let my boyfriends off the hook.Collection: Valentines
Even if you're unhappy, just pretend that you're happy. Eventually, your smile will be contagious to yourself. I had to learn that. I used to think, 'I'm being fake,' but you know what? Better to be fake and happy than real and miserable.Collection: Smile
If you can't sit in a cafe quietly and be ignored, how can you observe human nature and write a story?Collection: Nature
I would love to pretend I don't diet, but I work very hard. I stay active and eat very healthy. Anybody who says otherwise is either unhealthy or lying! I will admit that I'm addicted to sugar - licorice, Jujubees and jelly candies. And I actually love bran muffins!Collection: Diet
To put it simply - you know, a lot of people believe that the benefit of this job is fame and fortune. I believe that you pay for the fortune through the fame. I don't buy into the notion that being famous is somehow a good thing, or an exciting thing, or a wonderful thing.Collection: Famous
I had my baby outside in a thunderstorm. It was really romantic.Collection: Romantic
I am a classy dame.
I really believe that a woman doesn't reach her peak until her 40s.
The world is full of opportunities, and I want to try as many as I possibly can.
When I hear the words 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen,' I think, 'What. A. Dream.' There are no negative connotations to it.
I never developed hard cartilage in my ears because I played with them since I was a baby. I can fold my ear entirely inside out, and I can put the whole thing inside itself.
I think women in Hollywood who don't do Botox and plastic surgery are revered. I revere them... My plan is to never go there. I'm too vain to get plastic surgery because I don't like how it looks, and I want to look my best.
I'm very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don't even like the word 'feminism' because when I hear that word, I associate it with women trying to pretend to be men, and I'm not interested in trying to pretend to be a man. I don't want to embrace manhood; I want to embrace my womanhood.
Motherhood is a joy! I have dreamed about being a mother since I was 12 years old, and there's nothing disappointing about it.
I'm from Canada, and New Zealand feels like you took all the best bits of Canada and squished them onto a tiny island like Hawaii. I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of the South Island.
I'm the kind of person who, if I were living in another time, if I had to pick any time, I would probably be a pioneer. I just love the simplicity of what it means to work hard with your hands - to eat and survive.
The reality is when you open a door, there is no sense in closing it - so I would never say, 'I'll never act again.' But it's definitely not my priority.
I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because of the way men leered at and disrespected me.
When I act, I come away drained. When I write, I come away energized.
I'm good at looking good with weapons and stunts. But if you put a bull's eye in front of me and asked me to hit it, I'd say the chances of me hitting it are about one in a million!
A creative project is a moving target. You never end up where you start.
Every woman is after a kind of classy image.
I think that being isolated from the Hollywood world of premieres and red carpet events was probably good for me because I could ease into those at will and by my own choice. But in other aspects, when it comes to fanfare, Hawaii is nuts and in L.A. they're all so jaded. They don't care.
I have battled clinical depression and have come out of the other side. I've been free of it for many years now. Finding the place in my own mind and heart to win that battle without using medication, finding the place within myself where I could be alive again, that was one of the biggest challenges I've faced.
Life is magically beautiful. And it brings you what is perfect.
I'm allergic to Hawaii. Everything there makes me react in some way.
I'm very picky when it comes to men. I come across a man who I'm really attracted to about once every five years.
I love being outside - that's where I'm the happiest.
I'm a good Canadian girl. I miss all that good stuff. I miss tobogganing and I miss snowboarding, but I've also learned to surf and I've become a water baby which I used to be relatively terrified of the water and I kayak all the time now and I'm able to run year round on the beach which you can't obviously do in Canada.
I always wear something slightly masculine.
I'm a very stubborn woman and I'm from a very stubborn family of headstrong women. I have sisters, so the women rule the coop in my house.
There are jobs to be created on both sides of the climate argument. Whether we are investing in oil or sun, coal or wind, gas or algae, the economy will be stimulated by the investment. The economy, unlike each of us, is not swayed by ideology.
If Americans could choose, would they choose to work on the infrastructure for cancer-causing oil power or would they choose to work on the infrastructure for health-reviving wind power?
I was fortunate enough to be one of those stories where I was scouted on the street by somebody and actually refused to go to the agency, and was approached on different occasions and finally kind of caved and said, 'OK, I'll try it and see what happens.'
A month and a half after my first audition, I won the role on 'Lost.'
I was a good student, I was good at soccer, I was vice president of the student council, I was a pretty girl.
That's what happens in Hollywood. People are like, 'I want to hate you, because everyone else seems to love you.' But the reality is this: I'm a simple person who's not interested in attention and who just wants to go about her business.
My family didn't have a lot of money, and I'm grateful for that. Money is the longest route to happiness.
I didn't grow up in a home that glorified Hollywood. We didn't watch TV. We didn't have a lot of magazines around.
The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.
My heart is in helping people and in the less materialistic side of things, but there's the side of me that's more polished.
If I were to live in Africa, serving the poor, the number-one thing I'd miss wouldn't be running water or electricity - it would be style... being able to get dressed up and feel beautiful.
Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.
When I got the job on 'Lost,' I was a broke university student living in the crappiest part of town, with a duct-taped back window on a broken-down car. I existed on peanut butter and tea.
I was a massive Tolkien fan. 'The Hobbit' was... my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.
I consider acting a day job - it's not my dream; it's not my be-all, end-all.
I don't watch TV. When people at my house try to talk about TV, I'm like, 'Ah, I have no idea what I'm talking about.'
There's nothing more frustrating than when fans use a nickname. That's like people you don't know using names from people that you're intimate with. Like if my mom has a nickname and a fan finds it out and starts using it, that's creepy.
I just like short hair on women; I think it's cool.