In general, I think we’re more or less shaped and formed by our late 20s. Things come along during that time that make us cynical. By the time you’re in your 30s, it’s hard to unpick those mindsets that have formed. It takes years of therapy to undo them.
The Italian culture and values have significantly shaped who I am, and I would never intentionally demean or degrade the very culture that has been so integral to my life.
When I look back at the people who shaped me, that made a difference in my life, most of them were women.
The beauty of being a curvier girl is that we’re all shaped so differently.
Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
God made a very obvious choice when he made me voluptuous; why would I go against what he decided for me? My limbs work, so I’m not going to complain about the way my body is shaped.
I saw that there are people who will connive against innovation. They’re hostile to it. And that has shaped my behavior ever since.
Being in bands and plugging away with not many opportunities and no money for many years really shaped me and taught me about work ethic.
The deaf community has shaped me as an artist and a person, and I am very grateful that I have been able to share and create so much art with a group of people I would have never imagined sharing and creating with. It’s a true testament to the power of theater. There are no walls.
The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.
Having those positive friends around can really make a difference in how you view yourself. It’s helped me realize that there’s no such thing as having a perfect body, and just because I’m not shaped the same way as another girl is, it doesn’t mean I’m not pretty. It just means that no two girls are alike.
There is so much going on in our country and in the world today… We’re getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what’s really the story there? Well, I’m turned on by that kind of stuff.
If there is an abiding theme in ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’ it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people’s past histories.
The wilderness rescued me. I have been shaped by my experiences in the great outdoors. Feeling comfortable in the wild gave me the confidence to be who I am, not who others want me to be.
My documentary ‘Split Decision’ examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro’s revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.
I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I’ve long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we’re traveling.
I didn’t choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can’t imagine that being taken away from me.
I think I can see more clearly now – about how the pattern of past experiences has shaped who I am and the characters I have played – and I’m grateful for that.
Had I not gone through the struggles and the obstacles I had, I would not be as strong as I am today. I believe those impediments have forged, shaped, and strengthened my character.
The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child’s peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.
We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don’t think there’s any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry – if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.
Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.
My mom was a rapper and she really shaped me as a woman, and the music that she was letting me listen to as a child really pushed me in the direction that I’m going in right now.
My writing has been shaped by the three countries – Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England – I have lived in.
If you are what you eat, then you are shaped by what you share as you eat.
Going to an interracial high school shaped my understanding of social justice and racial inequality.
My mother says that my father truly enjoyed having a son. My two-years-younger twin sisters felt that he didn’t quite know how to enjoy them. But I wasn’t aware of those things then. So many of my childhood memories involve him. All the excursions into science were shaped by his knowledge and enthusiasm.
I’ve always thought my dad was fantastic and now I’m a dad myself I can see what an incredible sacrifice he made as a man in the 60s – he was there every day for me, cooked my meals and shaped me.
Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism.
I love showing my scar on my tummy – it is shaped like a question mark.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.
I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.
Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics.
Snowboarding has really shaped the person I’ve become, and I consider every moment a good one because every one has led me to where I am now.
Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
Modern Americans – shaped by raucous politics and a rapacious media – like to think of themselves as experts in confronting mistakes.
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
Over the years, I’ve lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
World history is shaped both positively and negatively by people who judge.
You’ll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I’ve written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
For 20 years I’ve had the privilege of representing Canada around the globe… first on the bike and then on my blades. The experiences have shaped me into who I am today.
Birds and insects are part of the ecosystem and help in pollination. I don’t see any problem in having fruits and vegetables that birds want to eat, as opposed to the perfect shaped tomato that only you can eat and which, by the way, could also be cancerous.
I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don’t think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.
Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different.
Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.
I say nice things about Mariah all the time. I tell Mariah all the time how much of a fan I am of her. She’s one of my favorite artists of all time… She’s shaped a generation of singers.
