Johannes Tauler Quotes

I can't be a man. But I can embrace the head of a man, the intelligence of a man, the spirit of a man.

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.

When I was young, my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] brought home this recording of Verdi's Requiem and we listened to it from top to bottom. By the end of it, I was a completely different person. It was literally a requiem mass for my former self. I was about 12 or 13. The Requiem just totally hooked into what I was going through emotionally - discovering my sexuality right at the time when AIDS was devastating my community and dealing with intense parental situations.

How can I be a man if there is no role model?

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

I want to figure out myself as a man.

In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.

You act at being a man, and before you know it, you are one.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

I'm a tomboy now. I always wanted to fit in with my brother's group, so I climbed trees and played with lead soldiers. But I'm a woman's woman. I never understood women who don't have woman friends.

I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before. I was a man now.

I got a lot of flak; in Texas, football is not only the social thing you must do, but you do it also to prove your manhood. They all couldn't conceive of why I'd want to stop to do 'The Importance of Being Earnest.'

When I was about eighteen, I saw myself as a rather sensitive, delicate, poetic, romantic figure. And then I got into the Civilian Conservation Corps and into the army, and I started smoking and drinking and being tough and getting muscles, and I had a whole different image of myself.

I was the ultimate tomboy because my oldest brother used to always beat up on me and wrestle and make sure I was engaged in sports, because I was his excuse to be able to go hang out with his friends.

I feel like a lot of black men 'put on' because of what they see and because of what people tell them they have to be.

Live experiences are more than fundamental - they're transformative.

The truth is that when a man has a child, and it's a girl, and he doesn't change as a man, he's not much of a man.

Up until I was 12 my sisters used to dress me up as a girl and introduce me as 'Claudia'! Twelve was a real turning point for me as I moved to a mixed school, and then I became cool and discovered hair gel.

I have a song called "Men." I mean, manhood and trying to be one, and failing as one, and trying to be a husband and a father, and failing at that. I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.

Back home I had always been comfortable around people. I was the troublemaker, always being funny - that's just who I am. I'm Latina; I've always had that extra little flavor. But when I got to New York, it became about being comfortable with myself in a place where I didn't know many people, and that was the big challenge. Ultimately my personality helped me build relationships with the people I was working with, and I was able to stand out.

To be a man requires that you accept everything life has to give you, beginning with your name.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

I believe there's a huge distinction between un macho and a real man. I don't think you have to be one to be another.

I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men—for certain people—to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.