When I was growing up, there were times I had to compete against boys in tae kwon do, and I’d show them right away that I wasn’t someone to mess with.
My father worked on assembly lines in Detroit while I was growing up. Every day, I watched him do what he needed to do to support the family. But he told me, ‘Life is short. Do what you want to do.’
Growing up, I knew I was different. But I didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal. I just knew that I had a really big, extended family. I was taught nothing about who we were or where we came from.
I don’t want there to be this separation between the rich and poor. I may be part of the three percent because I’ve been fortunate and done well for myself, but I will never forget about the 97 percent. That was me growing up. I was so poor I dreamt about being just ‘regular poor,’ not ‘poor, poor.’
Being black in America – especially as I was growing up – the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.
Growing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact.
My family… always had the value of the family table and these cultural influences of growing up.
Growing up in Poland, I didn’t have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don’t have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.
When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
Growing up in Canada, none of my family were performers or anything like that, but I was terrible at hockey, so they needed something for me to do on Saturdays for me to get out of the house. I signed up for theater school on Saturdays, and I’d go for four-and-a-half hours every Saturday morning and learn about theater.
Growing up, my next door neighbor was my best friend and an only child too.
I was a big fan of Aaliyah’s. Growing up, my mom was a big fan of her music. When I grew to have my own taste in music, I really loved ‘One In A Million.’ That was my jam.
I didn’t know when I was growing up that this was a very special program, that this wasn’t going on in other parts of the country. Now I realize that I was lucky.
Every memory I had growing up was involving a basketball. I didn’t go to the prom and stuff like that. It was always basketball for me.
You try various things when you’re growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.
My mum and dad had four pubs when we were growing up, but the main one was the New Inn in Hattersley, on the estate. It was a very good pub.
I learned a lot of lessons growing up on my family’s farm on the Eastern Shore: the dignity of hard work, the importance of planning ahead, and the joy you get from serving others. Not to mention how to collect eggs, shear a sheep, and bail hay by hand.
One curious thing about growing up is that you don’t only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents’ and grandparents’ lives come to you.
Growing up in Denver, I’m sure it started with loving the Colorado mountains.
When I was a kid growing up, you maybe secretly wanted to be an actor, but you never said.
Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
No matter where you are or where you grow up, you always go through the same awkward moments of being a teenager and growing up and trying to figure out who you are.
‘Commonwealth’ is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.
As a brother and sister, our tastes were pretty different growing up. He liked a lot of early hip hop. My dad didn’t understand it and would try to talk him out of it.
Growing up, I was obsessed with Disney movies like ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Beauty And The Beast.’ I was always singing the songs from these movies, so to find myself in the studio with Alan Menken was an amazing experience. In fact, it was a dream come true.
I grew up in a physical world, and I speak English. The next generation is growing up in a digital world, and they speak social.
When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.
My inspiration was my mom. She’s a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.
I’ve got three sisters, five aunties, and my mom. It must have had an influence on me growing up.
I just love stories, and I love movies, learning and seeing the world. Growing up in Iowa, it was like, you wanna see the world? Movies can help you do that.
I don’t really have many regrets. I did miss a lot of the events in the days leading up to my sister’s wedding because I was at a U17 camp. There were moments like that growing up when I felt like I focused too much on soccer. But that’s probably the reason I am where I am today.
Just growing up in Harlem, it didn’t matter what you had to do to get fresh – you would do it.
One thing I was taught growing up is it’s only pressure when you’re not prepared. And you’re just not working hard. Those are two things I do all the time.
I’d read about NBA players in magazines when I was growing up in Congo, but I had never actually seen what NBA basketball looked like because we didn’t have access to a satellite for TV.
I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and she was huge and beautiful, but she was lip syncing to a song. I was legitimately stunned.
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t.
I was a little rebellious growing up.
When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman – a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don’t hear about the Walkman anymore.
Everything we do in our growing up has been done before. But it needs recognition and validation each time for each one of us – public, private, and secret.
My dad said to me growing up: ‘When all is said and done, if you can count all your true friends on one hand, you’re a lucky man.’
I’ve always had an argument with my best friend that Spider-Man was way better than Batman. I was a massive fan growing up.
Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
When I was growing up, I idolised my father. I thought his ghost followed me around the house. I had been told how he adored me, how I was funny, just like him. Because of our lovely Catholic upbringing, I secretly assumed that he would eventually come back, like our good friend Jesus.
I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage.
Growing up, being watched from the outside… it’s kind of very taxing and maybe I should just do some kind of manual labor-it might be more relaxing. But I can’t, it’s not in my nature.
Growing up, I naturally embraced who I was, but I was always battling with myself. So I spent half my time being proud of being a woman and the other half completely hating it.
I always hated my mole growing up. I even thought about having it removed. At the time I didn’t do it because I thought it would hurt, and now I’m glad I didn’t.
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background is that when people are down and out, that’s when they’re probably the funniest. They have to be. That’s what they do to cope, to find joy, ’cause they don’t feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.
So I’m a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They’re living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.
When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.
I had a lot of growing up to do. A lot of times, I learned the hard way.
