Quotes About Childhood

At West Point, we first lived in Central Apartments in a third-floor walk-up next to the hospital where my father worked. My two younger brothers and I shared one big bedroom, and my parents had a tiny one.

I can't say for sure where I was headed the first time my mom put a blue blazer on me. Church, probably. West Side Presbyterian in Ridgewood, New Jersey, specifically, where my blazer was paired with a clip-on tie and a pair of khakis for a Sunday morning with my fellow congregants.

When I was four, we moved to the house on the west side of Chicago where I grew up. My earliest memories are of that first summer.

I was a little boy who watched 'Solid Gold' every week and wanted to be a 'Solid Gold' dancer. And I would do very in-depth reenactments of 'Grease 2' and 'West Side Story' with my sister Natalie in our garage. I was a very theatrical kid.

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia called Kenova. It's the city where the plane crashed from Marshall University. I watched the mountain burn, and my cousins were the volunteer firemen. I was 6 years old at the time.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

I remember growing up always loving the guitar. I used to love to watch the people play on the Country Western shows on TV. My folks told me that when I was just a toddler, I used to pretend I was playing a guitar on a toothpick.

We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.

Lee Ann Womack is from near where I grew up in East Texas, so I've always looked up to her. I sang a lot of Dolly Parton as a kid and a lot of traditional western swing, like Patsy Cline and Roy Rogers.

Country artists, I met a lot of them when I was five, six years old. I had an uncle who was a country and western singer and I met Lefty Frizzell when I was five or six years old in those shows that would come through Toronto from Nashville.

I think there have been more movies in the Western genre than any other. I grew up watching those movies.

I'm among the first girls ever to play Little League baseball, and to my knowledge, the very first in western Illinois. It was 1976, and I was a nine-year-old tomboy whose older brothers had played.

I grew up in a very small town, but it happened to be in western Massachusetts, where there were a lot of gay people. I remember my aunt going to a gay wedding when I was 11, and I thought it was the coolest thing.

My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.

I grew up in western Oregon, just outside Eugene, on 27 wooded acres that served as my playground.

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

My parents separated soon after I was born, so I left Helsinki when I was a year old. My mother took me to Paris and then other places throughout Western Europe.

You feel kind of powerless as a kid, so I wanted to create a world where the kid actually gets some power.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a jockey. I love horses, but it's not practical to have one in London. I also wanted to be an accountant, which isn't glamorous at all, but my dad was one, and I quite liked maths.

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what was practical: I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut.

We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.

I began to tell people that I wanted to be an entertainer. Between the ages of five and 11 there was an intense amount of practical drama going on.

I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!