Quotes About Growing Up In A Family

#1. Not to psychologize, but it's hard growing up in a family of 14 to ever feel like you're the center of the universe, or that you're that special or different. Because when it comes down to it, you're still fighting for food at the dinner table.

Ronan Farrow

#2. But it isn't true," Orville responded emphatically, "to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.

David McCullough

#3. Most young people seem to be behaving very intelligently: They look at things once in a while, but then they find it so idiotic and uncool that they just look away again. That is, provided they're not growing up in a family in which a drunk father is already watching pornos in the morning.

Volkmar Sigusch

#4. Growing up in a family of doctors, I wanted to be a brain surgeon for a while. But ultimately, I get most excited about creating things, which is why I decided to become an entrepreneur.

Alexa Von Tobel

#5. My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, and growing up in a family where the head of the household wasn't a man made a big difference.

Dave Mustaine

#6. Growing up in a family of actors, what's great about it is that they're very supportive and they understand what it's like to be an actor - the rejections, the highs and lows ... and having a common language with them is great because you have shorthand speech.

Chris Pine

#7. The saddest thing was actually getting fed up with one another. It's like growing up in a family. When you get to a certain age, you want to go off and get your own girl and your own car, split up a bit.

George Harrison

#8. When you're growing up in a family without a lot of money and four boys, it can't always be, 'Let's go see a specialist, see if you're okay.' If you got hurt, you just walked it off.

Ryan Reynolds

#9. After working for 14 years on Wall Street and growing up in a family with strong roots in small business, I know how important the entrepreneurial spirit is to attaining the American dream.

Ellen Tauscher

#10. Growing up in a family of gamblers, daredevils and practical jokers, I've learned a lot about timing and its first cousin, dumb luck, concepts I was introduced to while still in the womb.

Toby Speed

#11. I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.

Sandra Bernhard

#12. If you grow up where a snow mountain lifts its proud crown on the home horizon, in some strange way it becomes a member of the family.

Margaret Craven

#13. When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

George Weah

#14. Growing up I played piano and I sang at a lot of weddings; I grew up in a very small town, a little coal-mining town in Virginia called Grundy. And my family was very sing-songy at home.

Jayma Mays

#15. I grew up in Kolkata in a traditional family. We had friends who lived in mansions just like the one in 'Oleander Girl.' Growing up, I was fascinated by the old house and the old Bengal lifestyle.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#16. I used to watch 'Coming to America' every day after school. I have full-on long-running inside jokes with friends and family about different scenes in that movie alone. Also, my brother and I loved 'The Golden Child,' so, yeah: I was a huge fan of Eddie Murphy growing up.

Gabourey Sidibe

#17. Some of the greatest values that have influenced me through the years are those that I learned as a boy growing up on the farm. I remember mostly the love in our family, but I also remember the discipline. Then there was the work; we all had to work.

Billy Graham

#18. Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.

Chuck Palahniuk

#19. We were the only black family in an estate with 1,000 white families. Liverpool being quite racist in the Sixties, it was a bit grim growing up.

Craig Charles

#20. Mom did not want me to have anything to do with playing music. Being from a middle-class Black family in that particular era, everybody wanted you to have a profession
a doctor, a lawyer, and so forth. So she sent me to school to study medicine.

Don Alias

#21. I grew up in a family that my father was a very, very, a person with so many ideas, so many new visions and dreams. For me to grow up in that family, that also helped me to have a vision to create and open boundaries and things. So I think it's like, it just comes from the family.

Hafez Nazeri

#22. Not being a natural songwriter ... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Bonnie Raitt

#23. The spiritual ambiguity growing up made me really latch onto a faith - Protestantism - that was somewhat conventional. Everyone else was rebelling against traditions and institutions, whereas I was rebelling against the upheaval and uncertainty in my family.

Sufjan Stevens

#24. I think the obvious answer is I was raised in New York City, so growing up, not only myself but my family, like my father, we would watch a lot of Scorsese films.

Anthony Michael Hall

#25. As he was growing up, his family moved and lived in a number of different places in Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming. I didn't know then that moving around so much should have been a problem, so it wasn't.

F. Burton Howard

#26. 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.

Emeril Lagasse

#27. When I was a kid growing up in the States in the late '70s and early '80s, as soon as 'Dallas' came on on a Friday night on CBS at 9 P.M., we stopped everything from that moment on as a family.

John Barrowman

#28. There wasn't anyone in my family who was involved in the theatre. I saw a few amateur plays when I was growing up, but I can't think of anything that happened or anybody in particular who inspired me; it all came from within.

Garry Hynes

#29. I'm Jewish, and my family is Jewish. I was very interested in Woody Allen when I was growing up, but I don't think of myself as a Jewish writer. I'm more from suburbia, American suburbia. I'm more from the '70s than I am from Judaism.

Charlie Kaufman

#30. My family actually moved a lot growing up. I really only lived in one place every five or six years, and then we'd move again. That was just for my dad's work.

David Lambert

#31. Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions.In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.

Malcolm Gladwell

#32. Growing up, I remember I had several different 45 singles. But the first album I received was from a family friend: Emmylou Harris' 'Roses In The Snow.' It was so incredible. This record, to this day, is the favorite album of my life.

Kimberly Schlapman

#33. Mental illness was a family secret. This patient had four children grow up in foster homes, and they never knew her. It was heart-wrenching for her granddaughter to find this out.

Sean Moran

#34. I know Spanish pretty well. I'm half-Puerto Rican - my mom is from Puerto Rico - so I have a lot of family there, and my mom's first language is Spanish. But growing up in the States, and with my dad being from the States, I'm kind of just like this white kid.

David Lambert

#35. I think growing up in a big family taught me a lot of problem solving and how to share and compromise, and that's been helpful in my marriage.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#36. When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.

Salman Rushdie

#37. I have always been a HUGE Star Wars fan since I was like 5 years old. Most of us in the writers room at Family Guy were big nerds growing up and could recite almost any scene from Star Wars.

Alex Borstein

#38. In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking.

Mario Batali

#39. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#40. When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.

Mike D

#41. I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It's what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

Dwayne Johnson

#42. When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food ... but I also grew up with a Greek family; when other kids were eating fried okra, we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.

Cat Cora

#43. Growing up in rural Louisiana, the ecosystem around our home wove harmoniously into our family and into our daily life. Every life lesson that trickled its way into my being came from a mutually respectful relationship between the environment and my family.

Ian Somerhalder

#44. It's great hearing stories of my mum growing up in Brooklyn, then moving to Florida, having me and growing up with this eccentric, fun family. Although I don't eat a lot of Italian things, because I'm vegan. I was raised on meat and cheese, so I've had enough for anyone's normal life span.

Ariana Grande

#45. The big thing in my family growing up is that everybody had to play a musical instrument. We were like the von Trapps.

Maggie Stiefvater

#46. Growing up I wasn't the richest, but I had a rich family in spirit. Standing here with 19 championships is something I never thought would happen. I went on a court just with a ball and a racket and with a hope.

Serena Williams

#47. When you grow up in Chicago, your whole family is counting on you to go to college and do something distinguished. The last thing you're thinking is that you're going to make a career in show business.

Harold Ramis

#48. I have nice muscle tone in my arms. I can't really take credit for it, though - all the members of my family do. A lot of arm wrestling happened in our family growing up!

Michelle Monaghan

#49. The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents' house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#50. I'm just lucky to have great parents. My sister's an actress. My brother's a musician. I found it hard growing up in such a ... creatively driven family. I wanted to have this thing to create, myself.

Grace Gummer

#51. I'm from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also - I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening.

Bob Balaban

#52. Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

Sebastian Faulks

#53. When I'm home, the heart and soul of our family is in the kitchen. Growing up, my parents both worked, so dinnertime was for family - the TV was off. I think it's important to grab that time and really make it special, even after a tough day.

Cat Cora

#54. While growing up, I lived in a traditional joint family in Mumbai's suburbs.

Nita Ambani

#55. There were definitely curveballs in my growing up, from a family aspect. My parents got divorced when I was in second grade. I moved around a lot. Actually, I went to about four different schools when I was in fourth grade.

Taylor Hicks

#56. So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

Polly Toynbee

#57. Family is very important to me. People often ask me how I managed to stay grounded and sane, having started as a child star and growing up in the industry, and really, it's God. But it's also my family and God in my family.

Kim Fields

#58. If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family.

Steve Wozniak

#59. It's hard to give up the self-esteem connected to being codependent and appearing 'right,' which is probably a survival behavior learned from growing up in a crazy family. It feels like you will actually disappear.

Melody Beattie

#60. The main source of good discipline is growing up in a loving family, being loved and learning to love in return.

Benjamin Spock

#61. We live in a world of entertainment in full color with a lot of fast action, a world in which many children grow up thinking that if it isn't fun, it is boring and not worthwhile. Even in family activities we need to strike a balance between play and work.

Joe J. Christensen

#62. I've always loved writing, and my heritage has been interesting, growing up in a bi-cultural family. My mother being Vietnamese and my father being French, it's like an East-West meeting in my house.

Mylene Dinh-Robic

#63. You know, growing up, I lived in a neighborhood in Long Island where there was basically one black family. And I remember hearing all the parents and the kids in the neighborhood say racist things about this family.

Lorraine Bracco

#64. Growing up in a business-orientated family meant that I naturally learnt the tricks of the trade.

Anne Robinson

#65. While I didn't grow up in a family where there was domestic violence I knew of families in my neighbourhood where abuse was happening. I wanted to be part of the Women's Aid Real Man campaign to send out the message that real men don't abuse their partners or their children.

Huey Morgan

#66. I want to stress, this is the experience-growing up in a working-class family-that defined me and continues to define me. It's the core of my being. And it explains, incidentally, a good deal about my love of America.

Geoff Dyer

#67. My dark comic edge is the end result of trying to use humor to maintain my sanity growing up in a dysfunctional family in Honolulu.

Kirby Wright

#68. I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.

Carrie Mae Weems

#69. I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.

James Gray

#70. When you come from a big family, you see that, growing up, you're learning how to share. Your sisters have got your back; you're not alone in this - 'We all support you!' Your family provides that; it gives you a sense of safety, and it's a very grounding feeling.

Gisele Bundchen

#71. I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#72. If I'm talking to someone and they're feeling a certain way, I will definitely tie into that very quickly. You have to learn to read emotions and feelings when you grow up in a family with four brothers - especially if three of them are a lot bigger than you.

Henry Cavill

#73. When you're in a broken family and your role model is a violent male, boys grow up believing that's the way they're supposed to act. And girls think that's an accepted way men will treat them.

Jim Costa

#74. Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

Caitlin Rose

#75. I always knew what was most important to me. When I was growing up, nothing was more important than golf, but that's the attitude of a young person who hasn't a care in the world. Later on I figured it out. Family was first. Always. Then golf and business come after.

Arnold Palmer

#76. Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway.

B.B. King

#77. Growing up around Amish farmland, I enjoyed the opportunity to witness firsthand their love of family, of the domestic arts - sewing, quilting, cooking, baking - as well as seeing them live out their tradition of faith in such a unique way.

Beverly Lewis

#78. Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

Joshua Foer

#79. My family had a business where they worked with gravestones, and I remember growing up and playing in cemeteries like it was a normal playground.

Zach Roerig

#80. We all have days when we say that we are gown-ups, that we are mature, have a lot of experience and don't need advise from others.
But it is our mom and dad we turn to when we're in trouble or can't find the answer to a question.

Maurice J. Dubois

#81. Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.

Eva Hart

#82. I'm from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. So, you grow up around police officers. Some of them are in your family, some of them you have encounters with. I had a young police officer we were friends with in our group.

Tracy Morgan

#83. Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

Gary Oldman

#84. Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

Bharati Mukherjee

#85. Growing up in an Italian family, you use a harsh tone and 10 minutes later everybody forgets about it.

Elizabeth Edwards

#86. I think - I think you have a conscience growing up in a loving family with a nurturing community. And I think what happens is, and that's part of the problem of being in the closet which is a very sick place. I mean it's self loathing. It's self denial. And you keep that separate.

James McGreevey

#87. [On growing up in a large family with little money:] ... to take a bath ... we just had a pan of water and we'd wash down as far as possible, and we'd wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody'd clear the room, we'd wash possible.

Dolly Parton

#88. Growing up, I had a sense of the importance of commerce and trade to everyday life. Our family lived in several countries, and I was fascinated by the free exchange of goods and services between individuals and companies - the way both parties could benefit.

Muhtar Kent

#89. Absolutely the worst thing about this job is the travel and being away from family. I have a wife and three wonderful children, the kids are all active in sports and it's very difficult to up and leave and miss them growing up.

Roy Clark

#90. There are a lot of funny people in my family. Absolutely. There were a lot of jokes growing up around the dinner table, for sure. We didn't grow up in a creative family.

Nate Corddry

#91. Growing up in a multicultural family, I never really felt that I was different - even though I was from most of the kids in my school. Especially with music, I try to just approach it as an equal.

Priscilla Ahn

#92. I didn't grow up in one place, so I never had a certain mentality. I have some aspects of growing up in Texas, but I also have a lot of East Coast family. I would have loved to grow up on the East Coast.

Debby Ryan

#93. Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.

Roma Downey

#94. Me and my family growing up, we cleared our land built our homes and all that. So, I was very well knowledgeable in the construction world. That turned into a commercial development company and construction company.

Drew Waters

#95. As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

Eugene Jarecki

#96. Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.

Alan Bradley

#97. Growing up in a lower-income family, you don't have the resources to make ends meet and you have to find creative ways to get by.

Hilary Swank

#98. My dad listened to a lot of James Taylor when I was growing up. We had a couple of his cassettes in the car, and we'd go on a lot of long family car trips. It was either strange musicals or James Taylor - or Whitney Houston. It was quite the combination there.

Jessie Mueller

#99. Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

Jennifer Haigh