Formative Years Quotes

I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape. ~ Alex Turner

My mother was a politician in my formative years. ~ Antonia Fraser

My formative years, until I was 12, was all shaped by Jamaican culture, by that economy, by the people in my family, who are agriculturalists, who were plantation workers, who harvested those crops and took them down to the boats run by the United Food Company, to load those ships at night, hence all the songs that I sing that come from that environment. ~ Harry Belafonte

Ever since, Kovai had been a trusted companion in her life who brought frolic, magic and romance to her formative years; a silent witness to her tales of joy and sorrow who was never reluctant to offer a shoulder to cry. ~ Neetha Joseph

If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years? ~ Sendhil Mullainathan

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. ~ J. Gresham Machen

Opportunity is what these kids lack," Burns said. "The path is the corner or the stoop. We're talking about these kids here on the corner. They don't have advocates ... Corner kids, there's nobody rooting for them. You have to change that world, and where you have to start is ages zero to three. That's the most formative years of your life, and you're not even in charge of it. You got to go back and you got to create institutions that give that child the dignity, the self-respect, the love that he or she needs to go out into the world. (221-222) ~ Jonathan Abrams

When I was young, when the women of my generation were in their formative years, we were not taken seriously. Nor, just as damagingly, were our mothers, or our grandmothers. ~ Jane Caro

High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it. ~ Steve Aoki

In terms of what happened over that hiatus that I took, I just rested. I spent that time with my family, during their really formative years, and enjoyed that, and I messed with pills and new medications that help me to deal with dyskinesia and some other things I was struggling with, that I don't have as much now because of medication to counter the side effects. So, it just seemed like the right time to do it. ~ Michael J. Fox

I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass. ~ Roxane Gay

I counted his failings in my head: his obnoxious, cocky attitude; his pierced and painted wannabe girlfriend; his leather jacket and black motorcycle; his tattoos and multiple piercings. Even his name rankled. Dante. I'd spent my formative years dodging his type. I refused to be intimidated by him. That poncy lot. I seethed some more. And geeks? Surely he could come up with something more original. My entire year's work depended on a successful outcome here, and Tristan had assured me this guy was the real deal, not just another charlatan. We only had two night's use of the control tower. As of next week, it was scheduled for demolition. I'd convinced myself Dante was just a means to an end, and then he smiled at me, his hard, uncompromising face lighting up for just a second. With his sharp cheekbones and proud chin, he looked almost beautiful, and my stomach turned cartwheels. His eyes glittered like diamonds, pale silver that appeared luminous in the badly lit room. ~ Sofia Grey

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years. But as I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family, my aunties, grandparents, is in Africa. ~ Nipsey Hussle

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men's theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother's influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children's needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother's influence and teaching in the home - and how apparent when neglected! ~ Ezra Taft Benson

There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so - crucial. ~ Iris Murdoch

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me.

As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible - "painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was m ~ Robert O. Becker

All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could. ~ Isaac Asimov

When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years. ~ Tom Hanks

I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this. ~ Park Dietz

A general curiosity about the unknown sparked by the multicultural milieu in which I spent my formative years. There was a lot of unknown back then, too. I dare say it was easier to be an explorer then. ~ Herodotus

A big reason why I'm not a big TV watcher is that in my formative years as a viewer, there wasn't that much great television on, or at least, television that appealed to me. ~ Jack Falahee

One of the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a pillow in his formative years. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

They say you were something in those formative years. ~ Tori Amos

I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines. ~ Andrew Stanton

I could never work in a recording studio where you have this lovely view and a beach and the waves are crashing. For me, it's all about being in a tiny room with little windows. It's almost like you have to be in a prison. And you can create beauty when you're in that sort of deprived environment, which is a re-creation of your formative years. ~ Madonna Ciccone

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it. ~ Dennis Prager

Now, today, some children are enrolled in excellent programs. Some children are enrolled in mediocre programs. And some are wasting away their most formative years in bad programs ... That's why I'm issuing a challenge to our states: Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs; show us how you'll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten. If you do, we will support you with an Early Learning Challenge Grant that I call on Congress to enact. ~ Barack Obama

...you can love some all you want, but you can't go into their past and become a part of their formative years. ~ Caroline Kepnes

I don't consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there. ~ Patrick DeWitt

These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, "radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives," as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years. ~ Richard Louv

My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of. ~ Julie Andrews

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to real ~ David Foster Wallace

I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies ... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. ~ Max Winkler

It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened. ~ Joss Stone

I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

It is far, far better never to have been beautiful.
If you're gorgeous you're going to get by absolutely fine everyone will always want you in the room and you'll be lavished with attention, which you'll do very little to earn. Whereas, if you look like a sack of offal thats been dropkicked down a lift-shaft into a pond, you're going to spend many of your formative years alone. this may seem miserable - but you'll have space, space that you can constructively use to discover and hone your skills, learn a language, develop an interest in cosmology, practice the oboe, do whatever you fancy, really, so long as it doesn't involve being looked at or snogging anyone. And you'll very likely emerge from your chrysalis aged twenty-five as a highly accomplished young thing ready to take on the world. meanwhile, The Beautiful Ones will have been so busy having boyfriends and brushing their hair that they'll just be ... who they always were. ~ Miranda Hart

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. ~ David Foster Wallace

I'm very comfortable in Argentina. I was raised there as a baby and stayed there until I was 11 years old, so the first decade of my life or my formative years were spent in Argentina. I stayed in tune with the food, music and language. ~ Viggo Mortensen

I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years to hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state. ~ Barack Obama

I Lived on the street when i was a kid, i wasn't even at school, so i had a whole different set of experiences for those formative years. I was gone ... i was in a very precarious place when i was younger. ~ Jared Leto

There are three qualities that make someone a true professional. These are the ability to work unsupervised, the ability to certify the completion of a job or task and, finally, the ability to behave with integrity at all times. ~ Subroto Bagchi

My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling. ~ Carre Otis

I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures. ~ John Carpenter

How do you tell a young girl in her formative years that the real value, real wealth is only in acquisition of knowledge through higher education? In caring for the downtrodden as well as the learned. In committing yourself to the matters of culture and creativity, when your own life has been complete antithesis of the same? ~ Vinod Pande

They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles. ~ Nikki Sixx

He was miffed because he hadn't been the center of all my attention the night before. Pathetic. It would be enough to make me laugh, except he was also accusing me of dereliction of duty. I couldn't let my own Source believe I wouldn't do my duty. It would be difficult for him to do his job if he thought I wouldn't be doing mine. Plus it was irritating.
I drained the last of my coffee.
Karish looked horrified. "Zaire, woman, how can you gulp it down like that when it's still hot?"
Because I was a Shield. I gestured at the waiter. "You're left-handed," I said as my mug was filled. "But you use your right when you eat. You drank three mugs of ale and ate two bowls of the stew. You enjoyed it very much, even though you don't like turnip."
"Actually," he interrupted me curtly, "I'm allergic to turnip."
I almost smiled. Was he trying to shake my confidence? Amateur. "If you were allergic to turnip you wouldn't have touched the stew at all." Wouldn't want hives defiling that perfect skin. "You eat your bread like a woman - "
"What the hell does that mean?"
"You tear it off in chunks instead of biting into the whole slice. And you slather all sides with butter. That's disgusting, by the way." Butter was not icing and shouldn't be treated as such. "You sat straight in your chair, as you are now, without touching the back, despite certain fatigue. I would guess you spent some of your formative years with a wooden rod up your spine." He leaned back in ~ Moira J. Moore

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You could spend the rest of your life trying to outlive the scars that are left by what you go through in your formative years. ~ Todd Edwards

Maybe deep down inside we were all still in our formative years. Maybe it was never too late for any of us to change. ~ Claire Cook

Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome. ~ Sandra Bullock

Some of the things I liked in my years as a student in workshops: the occasional in-class prompt; discussions about what it means to be a writer in the world; professors who are brutally honest and encouraging at the same time (this is a tough one). ~ Mary J. Miller

The New Yorker has devoted itself for 59 years not only to facts and literal accuracy but to truth. And truth begins, journalistically, with the facts. ~ William Shawn

I've been on this earth for sixty-six years, and I've reached a conclusion and it's a fact: women are strange creatures. ~ Phil Robertson

I have been working for over 30 years and am always wondering about where I am and where I am going. It does not stop and become a fixed event of achievement. ~ Maira Kalman

2005 was a great year for me for fantastic roles that nobody saw. ~ Oliver Platt

What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates. ~ Eric Schlosser

I am for deporting all recent unattached illegals. I am for a local citizen panel to consider certification of those who have been here 25 years and have family and community and have been law-abiding and tax-paying. ~ Newt Gingrich

There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush's presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted 'from the gut,' and was economical with the truth until it disappeared. ~ Teju Cole

The [Donald] Trump plan would increase the national debt a little over a $1 trillion a year, the Trump plan would reduce taxes at all income levels with, of course, the biggest tax cuts going to the richest taxpayers as they always do. ~ Lawrence O'Donnell

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths. ~ Marcel Proust

Prolific irony - For 8 years, the finger on the button that could end the world belonged to a president who couldn't pronounce the word nuclear. ~ T. Rafael Cimino

I know inside that there is more to life than this mortal coil. It's a very shallow minded person who thinks that someone is born and dies and that's it. I haven't gone through thirty odd years of suffering, and doing what I do, and looking at other people who are born and die with cancer, with AIDS, with whatever, and think, 'well, what was the point of that?'. There is a point to everything, and we're here to learn, and it's just a learning curve and we'll move on, and this is just a shell. It's just I've got a dodgy shell. ~ Jonny Kennedy

It must be eight years since I last saw Joseph Taboys. How pleasant it would be to meet his jovial face again, to clasp his strong hand, and to hear his cheery laugh once more! He owes me 14 shillings, too. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

At 23 years old, I came into politics as a dragon slayer. At 63 years old, I'm going out as a dragon. ~ Aaron Broussard

2011 is one of those years that historians are likely to look back on as a 'hinge.' And the truth, at once frightening and exhilarating, is that we don't know yet which way the door will swing. ~ David Ignatius

Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and to millions tragic and terrible years? ~ Winston Churchill

Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup. ~ James C. Collins

Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don't give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don't be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don't allow yourself to burn out. I ~ Robert B. Reich

It still took years for me to let go of learned pattern's of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love but always within an unfufilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting. Care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, out right cruelty. ~ Bell Hooks

Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It's not until the second year that they learn the cures. ~ A. J. Jacobs

I don't think people were put here to be happy. I think if you decide to be an artist or a writer, you automatically accept the responsibility of being alone. However, after your 50 or 60 years are up you'll be able to look back and see this output that you've done that will endure long after you're gone, and will continue to fill the minds of millions of people. ~ Jim Steranko

The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me. ~ Colleen Atwood

I don't want to see Bev get hurt. Not after all those years of shoveling Roger's shit, and um ... this is awkward. I'm just wondering - "
"I'm keeping her," Tom finally said with exasperation.
John choked on his beer. "You're keeping her?"
"That's what I said."
"Does she know you're keeping her?"
"Nope. Not yet. Keep it under your hat."
"No problem. Good luck."
"I don't need any goddamned luck. I got daisies. ~ Penny Watson

You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago. ~ Denis Leary

I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy. ~ Philippe Petit

Now, with regard to the people who have done things we call "terrorism," I'm confident they have been expressing their pain in many different ways for thirty years or more. Instead of our empathically receiving it when they expressed it in much gentler ways
they were trying to tell us how hurt they felt that some of their most sacred needs were not being respected by the way we were trying to meet our economic and military needs
they got progressively more agitated. Finally, they got so agitated that it took horrible form. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Most curable sickness can now be diagnosed and treated by laymen. People find it so difficult to accept this statement because the complexity of medical ritual has hidden from them the simplicity of its basic procedures. It took the example of
the barefoot doctor in China to show how modern practice by simple workers in their spare time could, in three years,
catapult health care in China to levels unparalleled elsewhere. In most other countries health care by laymen is considered a
crime. A seventeen-year-old friend of mine was recently tried for having treated some 130 of her high-school colleagues for
VD. She was acquitted on a technicality by the judge when expert counsel compared her performance with that of the U.S. Health Service. Nowhere in the U.S.A. can her achievement be considered "standard," because she succeeded in making retests on all her patients six weeks after their first treatment. Progress should mean growing competence in self-care rather than growing dependence. 5 ~ Ivan Illich

To blame the schoolmasters of the last ten years for it would be ridiculous. The majority of them failed to hand on Christianity because they had it not: will you blame a eunuch because he gets no children or a stone because it yields no blood? The minority, isolated in a hostile environment, have probably done all they could, have perhaps done wonders: but little was in their power. ~ C.S. Lewis

My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward ... 'Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle [1831] expecting to document the natural world and he stumbled across something impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics
straight out of the pages of mythology ... In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and in some cases, nearly as hard to see. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Apparently, if you live until 75, you'll have spent 25 years in bed, so it makes sense to have a decent mattress. ~ Marc Warren