Top 70 Jessica Lange Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing. The only thing we have is now.”

— Jessica Lange

2. “Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart just to be present. Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, ultimately, your life is made up of moments. So don’t miss them by being lost in the past or anticipating the future.”

— Jessica Lange

3. “Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.”

— Jessica Lange

4. “Don’t be absent from your own life.”

— Jessica Lange

5. “Moments of pure happiness come upon you unexpectedly. Don’t be too preoccupied to experience them.”

— Jessica Lange

6. “I regret those times when I’ve chosen the dark side. I’ve wasted enough time not being happy.”

— Jessica Lange

7. “I want to live my life with no goals anymore, but just completely free, like I did when I was younger.”

— Jessica Lange

8. “The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.”

— Jessica Lange

9. “It is an embarrassing time to be an American. It really is. It’s humiliating.”

— Jessica Lange

10. “When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you.”

— Jessica Lange

11. “To stay interested in acting, I have to keep trying stuff I’ve never done before.”

— Jessica Lange

12. “If I had to start over, I’d pursue photography – probably to the exclusion of acting.”

— Jessica Lange

13. “I’ve got nothing left to lose at this point. The work I’ve done is out there.”

— Jessica Lange

14. “This idea of selfishness as a virtue, as opposed to generosity: That, to me, is unnatural.”

— Jessica Lange

15. “For me, nothing has ever taken precedence over being a mother and having a family and a home.”

— Jessica Lange

16. “Yes, and you should question your government.”

— Jessica Lange

17. “American Horror Story re-energized me; it re-energized my career. There’s no shame in recognizing that. It’s exposed me to a whole new generation, which is a little strange. I’m not used to young people thinking I’m cool.”

— Jessica Lange

18. “The worst is when I talk myself into something. Sometimes you take things because you want to work with a certain actor, or you want to work with a director, even if the script or the part’s not that great.”

— Jessica Lange

19. “If Ive got a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, thats usually a good day for me.”

— Jessica Lange

20. “Successful model? That’s a myth. The year I modeled was the most painful year of my life. Editors would always talk to you in the third person as though you were merely a piece of merchandise.”

— Jessica Lange

21. “I love men. I’ve always been drawn to poets, artists, and madmen. Sometimes all three in one.”

— Jessica Lange

22. “I never think of the future. I never imagine what comes next.”

— Jessica Lange

23. “Families survive, one way or another. You have a tie, a connection that exists long after death, through many lifetimes.”

— Jessica Lange

24. “To my mind the election was stolen by George Bush and we have been suffering ever since under this man’s leadership.”

— Jessica Lange

25. “I like to work in costumes, makeup, and hair that allow me tremendous freedom.”

— Jessica Lange

26. “Digital doesn’t interest me. It’s too many steps removed from the actual tactile thing. I still read books. I don’t read online.”

— Jessica Lange

27. “I do love acting. But to work as a photojournalist would have been extraordinary.”

— Jessica Lange

28. “It comes down to something really simple: Can I visualize myself playing those scenes? If that happens, then I know that I will probably end up doing it.”

— Jessica Lange

29. “I have a life that’s just been a well of loneliness.”

— Jessica Lange

30. “The only place I’ve felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There’s something in the water there that connects me to that place. There’s also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I’ve never been able to shake.”

— Jessica Lange

31. “My one big regret was that there were no scenes that I could play with Eva Marie Saint. I hounded them. I said figure out some way, I just want to play a scene with this woman. But there was no way to make it work.”

— Jessica Lange

32. “It’s easy to judge, to think we know for certain the right thing to do. Sometimes, it just isn’t so clear.”

— Jessica Lange

33. “Once I started on ‘Frances’ I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life.”

— Jessica Lange

34. “There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation.”

— Jessica Lange

35. “I take a jazz class and I also take just a regular exercise class with a man who gives me acupressure treatments. It’s just stretching and elongating the muscles.”

— Jessica Lange

36. “So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down – all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you’re left with expansive time and space.”

— Jessica Lange

37. “I’ve never been a sunny personality. I’ve never been outgoing. I’m a solitary person.”

— Jessica Lange

38. “If I didn’t have children I’d be a much better actress. I wouldn’t be so distracted. I could pour 100 percent of my energies into it, to promote the investigation which acting is.”

— Jessica Lange

39. “The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point...”

— Jessica Lange

40. “I had a big family – two older sisters and a younger brother. My family was like moving around a lot so I lived in a lot of small towns. My father was very restless.”

— Jessica Lange

41. “It took Sydney Pollack a long time to get me to do Tootsie. I asked myself if I wanted to play some frothy, ditzy character after I had just done Frances. Obviously, I’m thrilled that I did.”

— Jessica Lange

42. “In families there is always the mythology. My father died when my kids were quite young still, and yet they still tell his stories. That is how a person lives on.”

— Jessica Lange

43. “I love being a mother. I loved being a daughter, a sister, a wife. I love being a woman with men. I love having given birth.”

— Jessica Lange

44. “At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.”

— Jessica Lange

45. “What I love about photography, and it’s the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can’t be distracted, where you can’t be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.”

— Jessica Lange

46. “I worked on my voice for Sweet Dreams, but only to match my speaking voice to Patsy’s actual singing voice. That was my way into that character.”

— Jessica Lange

47. “There was a period of time when I was very political, when I was at the university. It was like the late ’60s, early ’70s and I was a dissident like everybody else I guess. Now I follow it but there’s nothing that really grabs me. The most fascinating thing to me right now is China.”

— Jessica Lange

48. “I am tortured when I am away from my family, from my children. I am horribly guilt-ridden.”

— Jessica Lange

49. “I never felt like I belonged in Minnesota when I was growing up there. That’s why I was out the door as soon as I turned 18.”

— Jessica Lange

50. “There was that feminist myth that we can do everything. I don’t think you can.”

— Jessica Lange