Quotes About Formative Years

#1. I have great parents, and they both taught me great things, but my formative years were boundaryless.

Roseanne Barr

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

Gary Neville

#6. The general disinclination of Spain to accept slaves from Islamicized regions of Africa during the formative years of Hispano-American society had enormous consequences for the development of music in the New World.

Ned Sublette

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. My mother was a politician in my formative years.

Antonia Fraser

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. ...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

#13. I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.

Elle Lothlorien

#14. Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women.

Reynolds Price

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. It appeared that spending my formative years getting smacked around by my dad may have earned me the privileged of getting smacked around by a bunch of vampires.

Veronica Wolff

#18. 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

#19. They say you were something in those formative years.

Tori Amos

#20. My formative years were all about 'Star Wars' - the first three, not the last crap, obviously. I understood 'Star Trek' but it was too caricatured for me.

Nick Frost

#21. I think it was interesting that when you're in those formative years you respond to things that interest you and don't always know where they lead. But they accumulate and add up to something that enriches your later life or leads you to some new experience.

Paul Smith

#22. 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

#23. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

Herbie Hancock

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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.

Ezra Taft Benson

#27. 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

#28. You're always looking at last year, or 10 years ago, or your school days, or your teenage years, your formative years. Because that's exactly what they are, they're your formative years.

Paul McCartney

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. My dad, who is a heart surgeon, works with many adult patients who did not take good care of their bodies in their formative years. He is able to teach them how to break old eating and exercise habits and reshape their bodies, but not without a great deal of resistance.

Daphne Oz

#32. I was fortunate to work with Corigliano for a few years in the mid nineties. Meeting and working with him during those formative years was an important experience.

Michael Hersch

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. I wouldn't be where I am, if not for Jamaica. My formative years were here. I wouldn't have the confidence that I have if I wasn't born here, because growing up here I knew I could become anybody I wanted to become. There was no ceiling on top of me.

Michael Lee-Chin

#38. I have very fond memories of the '80s; they were very formative years for me. I certainly remember the Cold War. It was a closer doorstep for the Brits than the Americans, so it was a very real and palpable threat at the time.

Matthew Rhys

#39. The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it's wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.

Stanley Donen

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

Ted Chiang

#43. The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

Ben Shapiro

#44. Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Jane Smiley

#45. I spent three years at RMIT doing a bachelor of arts and media studies. It was a hugely formative experience. As someone who had a private Catholic school upbringing, the world suddenly became a much bigger and better place for me.

Sonya Hartnett

#46. I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

Nick Clegg

#47. Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#48. Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.

Jason Robert Brown

#49. I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.

Ernest Cline

#50. The reason I make movies now has a lot to do with having seen Star Wars when I was seven years old. That's the formative movie-going experience of my life.

Chris Weitz

#51. I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#52. 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

#53. My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.

Jenny Lewis

#54. There's so much great stuff out there. The artists who've been most formative to me are the ones I've had the privilege to work with over the years.

Nick Blaemire

#55. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.

Lionel Tiger