Top 100 We Grew Up Quotes
#2. When I grew up in Flatbush, 'we played football, stickball and baseball all the time, right out there on the city streets. Football was my favorite.
Sid Luckman
#3. I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.
Don McLean
#4. I grew up in New York City, and both my parents worked. On weekends, we'd go out to the country, and on Sunday nights we'd come back. Sometimes we were a little cranky - it was a long drive. But we could always look forward to one thing: my mother's ziti and meat sauce.
Christa Miller
#5. We're a gumbo of American music, and aren't ashamed to play pop or soul or rock because we all grew up on radio.
Jonathan Cain
#6. Because I grew up in McAllen, we would watch Televisa a lot.
Cristela Alonzo
#7. In Lubbock, we grew up with two main things: God loves you and he's gonna send you to hell, and that sex is bad and dirty and nasty and awful and you should save it for the one you love.
Butch Hancock
#8. You can use power for good or bad, for control or freedom. You grew up watching your dad abuse it one way and it made you take the opposite direction. That's what we all think. Everything's about balance. That's what sustains life. Maybe your role is to keep your dad in check?
Katie Kacvinsky
#9. Part of the reason I am so evangelical in our campaigning work is that I had an unshakeable faith in Labour values, but we needed a machine worthy of the message. I grew up with a peerless Conservative machine, with vastly superior resources.
Douglas Alexander
#10. Well, you know ... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.
Tim Curry
#11. We weren't wealthy but we definitely weren't poor. We were incredibly rich because there was a wonderful community in Shepherd's Bush, where I grew up. All my friends were into villainy and crime.
Roger Daltrey
#12. I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.
Jesse Eisenberg
#13. I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that.
Neel Mukherjee
#14. We were taught manners and we had to do our chores - Katie and I grew up as normal kids.
Oliver Hudson
#15. Organic? I grew up on Angel Delight. We didn't have anything in the house if it wasn't neon!
Dylan Moran
#16. People in my family and camp who grew up listening to rap music love 'We Are Young.' I've heard it play at weddings. I've heard it in graduation parties. It's a big idea and big song.
Janelle Monae
#17. I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.
Rita Dove
#18. The next thing that happened to me was that I, we, were living in Paris where I then grew up.
Kitty Carlisle
#19. I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was ... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.
Freeman Dyson
#20. When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#21. My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.
Ernest Istook
#22. Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
Elizabeth Warren
#23. It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.
Vanessa Kerry
#24. But I also asked why they didn't chase their dreams. How many rock stars just settled for accountancy? How many astronauts grew up to be psychologists? Other kids were playing Mafia Wars, we were taking down the fucking Mafia and no it wasn't normal. It wasn't even close.
Mark Millar
#25. I just love cars; I've been like that since I was a kid. It's an infatuation because we grew up poor. Cars was something we were always trying to get.
Birdman
#26. I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.
Crystal Woods
#27. When I was a little kid we moved to Tulsa, then to St. Louis and, by the time I was in kindergarten, we lived in Springfield, Missouri. There I basically grew up.
Brad Pitt
#28. I grew up in a big movie house, we watched movies all the time, so I had an awareness at a very young age that that was a job that you could have.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead
#29. When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach.
Vivek Wadhwa
#30. Note to goyim readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I'm on it, here's another note: fuck you. That's all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you're a goyim, fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book.
Gilbert Gottfried
#31. I guess it was only fitting that to them PUNK was a four letter word. However, to people like Dylan and I-punk was our hearts-our souls. We grew up with a lot of uncertainties. To be a teenager isn't always pretty, and our music reflected that.
Brian Joyce
#32. When the towers fell ..." They cast such a shadow, and it stretched out over our lives. We grew up in that shadow. "And it made everything seem so trivial.
Stefan Mohamed
#33. I grew up in Sydney in a very political household, where we were all for the underdog.
John Pilger
#34. Cosplayers love Disney princesses. We all grew up with them. We identify with one or more princesses.
Yaya Han
#35. The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
Vanessa Bayer
#36. When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.
Nicole Beharie
#37. My father and my uncle used to be amateur monologuists because their generation grew up with Henry Irving and the like, and they had that style of delivery, of declamation: 'The Belllllls!' What we call 'ham' now, larger than life.
Ron Moody
#38. What are we to do when we seem to grow out of God? Or at least the understanding of God that we grew up with?
Brandan Roberston
#39. I grew up in Lake Orion, Mich. What was best about Lake Orion where, where we grew up was it was a suburb of Detroit but had a lot of open space around.
Andrew J. Feustel
#40. I grew up in East Germany, so we had to learn Russian in school ... everybody hated it. I never thought it would come in handy ... And being an actor, I've been able to use it quite a bit.
Tom Wlaschiha
#41. The traditional model we all grew up with is obsolete.
Jim Stengel
#42. When I grew up, we didn't have a TV, and I think more families today have ambitions of getting out of their environment, such as sending their children to university.
Robert Winston
#43. Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.
Bernie Mac
#44. I love mythology, grew up loving it. I'm a middle kid, big family, that's the thing you did in the farm country. I lived in Iowa, I loved mythology. I don't know, we're like that.
Kellan Lutz
#45. When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.
Gus Van Sant
#46. You got to miss class to do it. Like, many periods of school. And then they took us to an elementary or middle school, and we told kids that they could be cool when they grew up even if they didn't do drugs.
Ilana Glazer
#47. I grew up on Lake Michigan during the PCB explosion, and I remember seeing the sick, dead fish with tumors, the weird deformed seagulls, the scum and the filth floating. We couldn't go swimming.
Mark Ruffalo
#48. I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
Bernard Hill
#49. I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.
Bonnie Bedelia
#50. We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly.
Jill Soloway
#51. I just came from South Africa, a place that had been in a perpetual uprising since 1653, so the uprising had become a way of life in our culture and we grew up with rallies and strikes and marches and boycotts.
Hugh Masekela
#52. We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
Viola Davis
#53. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents.
Pico Iyer
#54. I grew up in a home and in a world in which you can do anything. We were all expected to go to college. My father was a doctor.
David Alan Grier
#55. Some people are born with very little; some are fortunate enough to have it all. When I grew up, we didn't have much. I had to hustle to get what I wanted ... but I had that hunger for more. I didn't always make the right choices, but I learned from my mistakes.
Curtis Jackson
#56. I grew up in a village of 12 houses. We had a well and a cow.
Olesya Rulin
#57. I remember I grew up in a poor family and we had almost nothing and we were not treated very well by our family. There was no safe haven for us. But somehow we always managed to be happy.
Luis Negron
#58. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
Sherman Alexie
#59. When my family did shy away from Indian food, we'd eat a lot of Chinese. We'd use the wok a lot. I never had a problem with Brussels sprouts or broccoli growing up. I always grew up with the mentality of finishing your plate.
Parvesh Cheena
#60. I grew up hunting with shotguns and rifles, and we had a gun in every corner of the living room. I'm not a gun advocate, but that's the way I grew up.
Anson Mount
#61. I grew up in Yorkshire, and once or twice a year, we'd travel over the Pennines to see my cousins in Cheshire.
Anthony Browne
#62. As the children get older and know what they want ... We all grew up at one point.
Fetty Wap
#63. My mom's Brazilian, so she and I definitely grew up with different perspectives. I was born in America, and she's from Brazil, so we have different ways of doing things. There's a bit of culture clash there.
Maiara Walsh
#64. I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved, and I see, as a country, as a people, we are a republic. We are a democracy.
Craig T. Nelson
#65. Remember, we really grew up separately; our life experience was very different because of segregation. So I think comedy is a good space to work those things out and educate everyone about the different experiences and different race groups in South Africa.
Riaad Moosa
#66. I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.
Louise Erdrich
#67. We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.
Philipp Meyer
#68. Randy Newman and I grew up together in Los Angeles. We are both products of the film studio era. Randy is one of the great songwriters of our time and one of the fun people to be with.
Leonard Slatkin
#69. It's not like we grew up hanging around in church every day. We'll always stick to what we feel is right for us to do, and I don't think either of us have had a hard time saying, 'This is who I am, and I'm fine with it.'
Josh Dun
#70. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#71. I grew up in a show business family, so we've always had a great sense of balance, being so close to my parents. I've always known what is and isn't reality.
Andy Gibb
#72. When I grew up, my family, we sat down, all of us to watch 'Good Times,' 'Sanford and Son,' all those shows that were out at that time.
Magic Johnson
#73. We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.
Steven Pinker
#74. I grew up in Chicago, and there was always snow. In Los Angeles there never was, so we would always import snow!
David Hasselhoff
#75. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.
Heston Blumenthal
#76. Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.
Lily Tomlin
#77. My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.
Ansel Elgort
#78. The New York Dolls are the only band that we grew up on that we haven't played with.
Tommy Lee
#79. I grew up in Europe, and soccer was the first organized game I played. When we moved back to the U.S. in the middle of 4th grade, I switched to American football and stopped playing competitively until college, when I played intramurals.
Andrew Luck
#80. I grew up playing war. We threw dirt and rocks at each other. We'd lead attacks. We'd break up into squads. It became a neighborhood thing for a while, our neighborhood against the other neighborhood. There was always a war breaking out somewhere.
David James Elliott
#81. The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they're all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.
Anthony Marra
#82. I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.
Apparat
#83. Diana Ross is a big inspiration to all of us. We all grew up watching everything about her - her mike placement, her grace, her style and her class.
Beyonce Knowles
#84. I grew up in a house with dogs. We always had dogs. We always had a bunch of dogs, actually.
Lee Pace
#85. I think all of us could play the teacher because we all grew up with teachers. It's just kind of this peeking-over-the-shoulder presence that we've all grown up knowing.
Ryan Eggold
#86. I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.
Erin McKeown
#87. I grew up in Minnesota, where we treasure our tradition of civic engagement - and our record of having the nation's highest voter participation.
Al Franken
#88. Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings.
Brad Pitt
#89. I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.
B.B. King
#90. When I grew up in central London, we had six pavement slabs for a garden.
Keeley Hawes
#91. I grew up in Texas, but that was 20 years ago. Last year, in Fort Worth, they had hail the size of softballs. We're seeing more and more powerful storms, of all types, almost on a biblical level.
Bill Paxton
#92. I find it hard to be labelled in this new 'super-rich' category because we all grew up with very little. The idea that 'to get rich is glorious' is really a new phenomenon. I certainly didn't grow up like that.
Zhang Xin
#93. I know there are some good American police. But I grew up in a country where we were afraid of the police.
Peter Sis
#95. I grew up in a very celebratory town. We celebrate everything, from life to death and everything in between. So a lot of dramatics come into my aesthetic. And I'm an actor, so that adds more to the dramatic - I don't mean over-the-top. The main thing is never to be boring.
Bryan Batt
#96. I grew up in a poor family. I had to cut everyone's hair, because we didn't have money for entertainment.
Anthony Jeselnik
#97. I loved the towns I grew up in as a boy, and after I became a celebrity, I went back several times. I would have had the time of my life seeing the old places and the old faces again, but the attitude of those same people was, "I guess you're so big we bore you now."
Johnny Carson
#98. I grew up in Mississippi, and there's no fashion game there. Even in 'Bling Ring,' I had to learn a lot about fashion - you know, the differences between lapels - and it wasn't until we'd wrapped that I really started getting into it.
Israel Broussard
#99. As a child, as far as I was concerned, my dad had an amazing job, and we had all the money we needed. My life was so fun and carefree that I didn't realize at all that we weren't rich - until I met someone rich. Still, I've never met a rich kid who grew up as happy as I did.
Artie Lange
#100. With these Funny or Die videos, I do everything for them. I write them, act in them, and co-direct them with my buddy Brian McGinn, who I grew up with. We also edit them together. We're working on a small scale of Internet videos, but we're slowly trying to make them become a bigger thing.
Dave Franco
