Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.
I didn't have parents, so I lived in people's homes... And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother.
Being raised by a Catholic father, a Protestant mother, and marrying the Muslim father of my three children, I encourage people to respect and at least try to understand different religions.
My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.
An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
I don't think anybody else could have gone out there with Brock Lesnar and do what I did. I stand by that, and I'm proud of it. My father and my mother were in the front row watching, and they got to see their son go toe-to-toe with Brock Lesnar. Not many people can say that.
I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.
My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.