Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You know I really don't like to think about the fact that I'm a girl in relation to the music industry. I was just a kid who wrote down thoughts to organize her brain and that turned into music, like any other writer or musician... so, I happen to be a girl. I don't consider that part of it really.. It may disappoint some feminists out there that I don't want to harp on women and men being equal.
I went to this dance with some of my friends and there were kids saying `I know who you are - you`re Aaron Carter!` It doesn`t bother me if people confuse us. I know we`re very different. I am who I am. I don`t wanna say I have a temperbut I do! I kind of sulk and sit there when I`m bitter. I won`t show you, but you can see it. Probably if you bring me Godiva chocolate, I`ll be your friend again!
A slam dunk or a breakdance move is limited by what the physical body can do. Now, a skateboard is limitless by design, by not only the dynamic of the board and the way it goes but also what you build to skate on. Basically it's like a slam dunk contest that will progress every for the life of the sport. Five years from now there are going to be kids doing stuff that we didn't think was possible.
I really think kids should understand that music is like learning the alphabet. You put small letters together to make words, and then you use these words to create a story, but with music. And they really need to know how to mix and match those letters and how to come up with something that is really interesting, or speak in metaphors as poets do to show us something maybe we didn't think about.
I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria. And so I always say that I'm literally an African American. So my last name is Famuyiwa, it's different. And so that was a part of my experience from people not being able to pronounce it to not sort of having sort of a shared, common history with a lot of the kids that I was growing up with because my parents were from Africa.
People ask me all the time how I got hired onto the Office. Another common question is how do I manage to stay so down-to-earth in the face of such incredible success? ... A third frequently asked question is: "Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?" This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City.
One of the last times that we played in the area before I wrote "Allentown," I remember a guy coming up to us and saying, "You're never coming back here." I said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Well, you're probably gonna become a big star. Nobody who ever becomes big comes back here." And I felt so sad for this kid, he seemed so bitter about it. I said, "Well, I'm coming back, no matter what."
I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays — they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year—but what if he truly liked a major celebration? What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West 'a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors'?
We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success.
There was a culture that came out of the self-esteem movement which was don't anybody keep track of the goals. The kids keep track, but nobody keep track of the goals because we don't want the kids to have the experience of losing. And in depriving them losing, thinking it scarred them to lose, we made losing so taboo, so unspeakable, that we instead made losing more scary to kids, not less scary.
When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything and play anything. I just felt super-confident. And then, once I started to play music professionally, maybe it's from being from a small town, but you grow up and then you're suddenly a big fish in a small pond, and I realized that there were a billion other drummers out there that could play as good as you or better, and everybody wants that job.
I noticed the different kids were always put down by other people and it would cause them to become almost violent with themselves. It's not really necessary; there's a way to find strength in yourself, and for me it was writing. That was sort of my release and my escape, so the term 'Knives and Pens' to me was like a choice. You can either create, or become violent, and maybe go down a dark road.
I found it was my good fortune to somehow be able to work in these forms that I loved when I was a kid. I love movies and I could write screenplays. I love theater and I could write plays. I mean, they would be my own, I could never write what was used to be called the well-made play. But my first play, "Little Murders," turned out to be a great success and a great influence on plays at that time.
Our kids didn't do this to themselves. They don't decide the sugar content in soda or the advertising content of a television show. Kids don't choose what's served to them for lunch at school, and shouldn't be deciding what's served to them for dinner at home. And they don't decide whether there's time in the day or room in the budget to learn about healthy eating or to spend time playing outside.
The kid dead on the ground. Fourteen, Ash. Fourteen. I’m fourteen.” – Nick “Yeah…” – Acheron “Ash, I’m fourteen.” – Nick “Got it. You’re fourteen. I’m so proud you can count that high. It’s a testament to the modern American educational system. But I should probably point out that you’re not the only one. I’m told you go a school with a whole class of – get this – kids who are fourteen.” – Acheron
I remember when I was a kid, with the acting thing, I resented it because, you know, you don't want to do what your parents want you to do. You got your own things. And the whole idea of getting a job because of who your father is - that didn't feel right. But after a while I guess I figured I must be doing something right, because people wouldn't keep hiring me if I didn't have something to give.
There's a lot of important issues being brought to the world about America's role in proliferating weapons, about the lack of responsibility of anyone in authority in this country, you have the torture program, that NSA surveillance is Edward Snowden's fault, just like proliferation of weapons is these kids' fault. It's ridiculous, there's never any consequences, there's never any lessons learned.
What I love to tell young kids is ultimately let your dreams evolve around your opportunities. You have to focus on always learning. It's cliche, but the reality of it is that if you take action and try and fail you're gonna learn a lot by the time you try it again, and you'll build a foundation of experience that's gonna be ultimately the rock that allows you to find success or follow your dreams.
I was sowing wild oats and doing the kind of things that you should do when you don't have kids. Now, I'm just doing less of that, but I earned it, you know. I feel like just spending quiet evenings with my wife and son and sitting in bed in the morning and watching him marvel over the curtains opening or whatever little thing. That all feels really good. And so, I've changed because I'm impressed.
I wanna hear it, I wanna hear it from each and every one of you. I wanna hear it from the kids, the men, the women. I wanna hear it from every single person in this arena. I want you to stand up out of your seat, I want you to get up and do what you should have done a long time ago! I want you to admit that you were wrong! All of you! You all were wrong! Each and every single one of you! I made it!
I always wondered if those WWJD bracelets worked, so I bought one the other day. Well, a few minutes later, I was on a plane and this little kid was kicking my seat repeatedly, while his sister sang along with her walkman and their mother just sat there. I almost turned around and went off, and then I caught sight of my bracelet. What would Jesus do? So I lit them on fire and sent them all to Hell.
Kids are probably frustrated and egos are too much involved and kids don't know how to get together and be kids and start a group and it's kind of sad because I feel like if you come out with three or four people in the beginning, you can be protected and everybody can shield each other. Before you get out there by yourself and get all these people coming at you. I just think it's not really there.
I have sat with the mothers who have lost addicted sons. I have sat with families of kids who have been killed in drug-related gang violence. I have been to the prisons. I have seen the effects. At some point in time, I felt I had to do something other than write a novel about it, that I needed to try to make some sort of contribution, at least try to make some sort of difference in the real world.
I have an absolutely unshakable faith in kids, grounded in the fact that I worked for three years in one of the worst public schools in Baltimore, with kids most people would write off because of their backgrounds. But, when I set high expectations, at the end of the day, these kids went from scoring at the bottom on standardized tests, to scoring at the top, despite their unfortunate circumstances.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.
A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid.
I kind of grew up a guitar nerd and I tried to figure out how to shred on an acoustic guitar as a kid, while listening to jazz or whatever. So that is kind of a different thing and my church background, growing up with worship kind of the ground that I learned how to play music from. Those are all odd ways of growing up, compared to most people, so I think the music has plenty of uniqueness in that.
I was here at Spurs as a kid, too, and I cleaned David Ginola and David Howells boots. I got a nice tip of £60 from each of them at Christmas. Howells was quick to give me this but I had to ask Les Ferdinand to explain to Ginola about our boot etiquette and the tradition of tipping at Christmas. Everyone wanted to clean Les Ferdinand s boots because he was the best tipper. He gave out £100 one year.
As you get older and as your situation changes, it becomes different. Yes, I have to provide for my family, so if there's a chance that I'm not going to be able to provide for my family, who is always number one, my kids are always number one, then yeah, maybe it's not the same. But like I said, everybody's boiling point is different and you get to that point differently and you're at peace with it.
It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.
I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that?
In the very first debate I was asked am I a moderate or a progressive and I said I'm a progressive who likes to get things done. Cherry picking a quote here or there doesn't change my record of having fought for racial justice, having fought for kids rights, having fought the kind of inequities that fueled my interest in service in the first place going back to my days in the Children's Defense Fund.
I came back to this idea of telling the stories of women who aren't in all of the history books. Their names are not up there next to male names that we've know since we were little kids. Ching Shih, for example, was a pirate commander from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. She was one of the most fearsome pirates, why is her name not included when we list the names of great pirates like Blackbeard?
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.
The process of socialization is nowhere near complete at age five or six, when modern children start spending up to half their waking hours taking their cues from other people's children. Because they accompany their parents' daily routine, homeschooled kids spend plenty of time interacting with people of all ages, which I think most people would agree is a far more natural, organic way to socialize.
There was a guy with mental illness in the middle of the street just yelling and hollering. I have a number that I can call - it's not 911 - to tell them, "You need to help this man get out of the street." But you have to be that person, you have to pick up the phone, you have to do it; you can't just walk by and act like they're not people. They're somebody's kid, somebody's dad, somebody's brother.
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.
The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.
When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.
Advertisers have become scared of talking about certain issues because they don't want to upset an American family. I think it's a shame because there are things we want to talk to our kids about. So to be able to talk about LGBT issues on our shows. To be able to to talk about sex on our shows. Now if you're like, "I'm going to do an episode talking to kids about sex," on a network that's hard to do!
All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.
I wasn't a kid when I came out. Soulja Boy was 16. I'm saying that when he came out he was a kid so it was naturally a show for him. It's not about the music right away. It's a show for him. Not that he's not putting enough effort into his music, but how much effort can a 16 year old put into his music because as you mature and get older even the songs he's doing now has evolved and he's looking back.
I remember when my daughter was twelve, suddenly a boy started hanging out in front of our house after school. It was this kid, Justin. My office at the time was right in the front, so I just looked out the window. I couldn't write. I couldn't concentrate. I was like, "What are you doing? What do you expect to achieve by standing in front of my house with my daughter inside?" I hated that kid so much.
The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.
Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.
More than we care about their "success," vocation, or financial status, our hearts will be encouraged when our kids are faithful followers of Christ, and our hearts will be distressed when our kids appear to reject the Christian faith. So, the most important thing is transferring our kids' allegiance from us to Christ, raising faithful disciples who seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.
There are so many times in my life when I wish I had the power to destroy anyone who would threaten or seek to humiliate the people I love. When you were a small, shy, awkward kid like me, and you saw and experienced some of the things I did and you can do nothing, you're going to gravitate to those comic books and fantasies where the nerd gets bit by a radioactive spider and can beat up the bad guys.
[Young people] can't do much with [student debt] other than try to figure out how to pay it down. They can't take jobs they want. They can't get the credit they would like to start a business. So we're going to refinance it, we're going move people into income-contingent repayment plans, we're going to have a date certain when their obligations end, and I'm not going to let the government harass kids.
We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.
I'd never imagined myself writing at all until I was almost 30. And horror films weren't to my taste, at least the super popular (slasher-y) ones of the day back then. The first novel I ever loved as a kid was Frankenstein, and I was always a crazy Hitchcock and Polanski fan... but I never saw myself - a square spazzy girl from the suburbs - writing anything that would horrify anyone. Or so I thought.