Danielle Trussoni Quotes

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.

I have always been intrigued by other cultures, and traveling to foreign lands has always been a part of my personal passion for learning about our world.

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

I have a house, I try to spend as little time in it as possible. Not always easy on the mind and body, but it's how I got myself to 80-plus countries. This kind of routine forces one to reinvent and improvise. The older I get, the more important this is to me.

I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

I had gone to Europe . . . to reach for a place as a serious artist, but I never doubted that I must return. I was - and am - an American.

It's important for people to try and be more like Marco Polo in how he explored the world, very few of us nowadays pay attention to cultures and try to understand them.

I grew up in a remarkable home, the middle of seven children. My parents raised us well. They loved us well. We laughed hard growing up. But being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home, whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three. When you don't know where you fit inside the home and you're young and you're desperate to fit in somewhere, I'd figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some bad decisions about who I hung out with, I dropped out of high school, got kicked out of the house.

What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?

Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

I have said many times-if I hadn't been exposed to music as a child I don't think I would have been president.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

I've travelled a lot, but I am essentially American. All my input has been American.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

When you grow up in that (multi-ethnic) environment, you see the world differently. Being a mixed-race child, I didn't always see colour in people, I really didn't. It was other people that made me see the colour all the time.

Nature only goes so far. Nurture, what you raised on and what you ingest as a youngster, it really affects you when you grow up in really subtle, long drawn-out ways. And to find that, to hear that thing again all those years later and to realize that was the source, it's like, "What else has me twisted?" So now I'm going back to robots and cartoons; I go back to all this to see what got me the way that I am.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

When you have kids it's nice to have a place where they can always return to and some place where they will grow up in, but I never had that. I'm not attached to things and places. I like that we [the family] keep moving. It's a nomadic life, and I think that's a great life. I'm excited when we take our kids to a new country and they don't just immediately look for the comforts of home. They blend into that country. Send them to any place in the world and they won't be scared. They'll just feel like they can make friends there.