I was the only child born to Josephine Perry that survived. Mama had six other children before me, and all had passed very quickly and very young, all succumbing to a combination of illness and disease and the lack of strength to fight off both.
Bonnaroo has kind of become the granddaddy of all American festivals. The thing I love about it most is that it wasn't born out of picking the top ten bands off the Billboard chart and creating a festival around it.
And I ask why am I black, they say I was born in sin, and shamed inequity. One of the main songs we used to sing in church makes me sick, 'love wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?
A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy, the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother's love.
Some of us are born with a weakness for music. As a baby, music would stop whatever thought I was having. If I was worried, it would stop me worrying; if I was crying, it would stop me crying. Music was a healing thing for me.
I'm very interested in music, but I was not born musical. I honestly do think some people have the knack. I can't play an instrument. I'm a terrible singer. I'm not about to launch my album!
I prefer to work for my country in a free and independent way. I was born free, and I want to die free. I am always suspicious of ideology. Instead, I respect men with ideas.
Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine.
It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.
This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.
When it comes to meeting and attracting women, many men are resigned and complacent. We figure some guys were born with that particular power and other guys weren't. I wasn't.
Some men are born old, and some men never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful, we are always young and at last die in youth even when in years would count as old.
My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.
I would go visit my mom on Sundays, and my brother was working on stuff. I'd go in there and sing a little melody, then we started working with words and the next thing you know it was just born organically without really trying.
Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels ...
By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.
Tick: [to Felicia] Is it true when you were born the doctor turned around and slapped your mother?
Senior Ed Bloom: I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine.
[Holding baby William] Marty McFly: So you're my great-grandfather. The first McFly born in America. And you peed on me.
