My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.
We all get misinformation growing up about people who are different from ourselves.
I think my parents were immigrants, you know, so I guess I would be first generation. Growing up in California.
lf you’re going to deal with reality, you’re going to have to make one big discovery: Reality is something that belongs to you as an individual. If you wanna grow up, which most people don’t, the thing to do is take responsibility for your own reality and deal with it on your own terms. Don’t expect that because you pay some money to somebody else or take a pledge or join a club or run down the street or wear a special bunch of clothes or play a certain sport or even drink Perrier water, it’s going to take care of everything for you.
They don't really focus on that history here in America. I remember growing up as a kid, history class was very washed-over. They didn't really get into the gritty bits of slavery. It's a very, very small section in the history books. It's not something they really touch on directly with American curriculums.
That's such a great thing about New York, after growing up in a place and being there for twenty plus years, there's still a whole island to discover.
My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent. . . I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.
Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up.
Me and my family growing up, we cleared our land built our homes and all that. So, I was very well knowledgeable in the construction world. That turned into a commercial development company and construction company.
As I look back on it now, I'm thinking of one very vital factor, that one factor being that I was afforded the luxury - the luxurious opportunity - of finally being able to put something back. As a child growing up, it was his [Frank Sinatra] efforts that put a roof over my head, food in my stomach, clothes on my back, and that got me an education and sent me to the doctor when I was sick. All those things a child could benefit from parent. I did not want to be in a position where all I had ever done was take, take, take, frankly.
I went into the Army, and one day, in the middle of a bull session, somebody called me an atheist. Believe it or not, it was the first time I'd ever heard the word. It goes to show you how a person can grow up in America and have a college education and still not know a goddamned thing.
I would have been a lot better off if I’d studied more when I was growing up, y’know. But you know where it all went wrong was the day they started the spelling bee. Because up until that day I was an idiot, but nobody else knew.
You have to grow up, start paying the rent and have your heart broken before you understand country.
I want to be a positive influence in little girls' eyes. Little girls need to be confident and grow up with a healthy state of mind. It's a tough, tough world out there.
Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway.
For me growing up, I've found that I don't really go out and party and I don't hang out - when I come home and I'm home, I'm a pretty chilled person.
. . . people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.
We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.
Well, growing up in LA, things are kind of thrust in front of you. You're almost forced to grow up pretty fast, with experiences and stuff. Going to that school there were a lot of rich girls, a lot of partying, a lot of wild things. You're put in this environment where you're forced to wear a uniform. It was all girls, so you rebel naturally, I think. I don't know, I just kind of got inspiration from every day living and going to school.