Chance The Rapper Quotes

When you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the streets, and people die every day, there's nothing funny about it.

I lost a lot of homeboys growing up, a lot of family, at early ages.

Unfortunately, man, a lot of places in America have to deal with unnecessary violence. Somebody like me who knows it firsthand and could relate... I had a best friend killed, plenty other friends killed. I been through it. I seen it.

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

You can live an entire lifetime in Chicago and not hear a gunshot, but if you go in a certain neighborhood then you can live your whole lifetime hearing gunshots all the time.

However light-hearted you try to be about it, the loss of youth, and everything that goes with it, is quite a trauma.

It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.

A lot of people who start work at a very young age never grow up because they never got that opportunity to be a child, so they hold on to that and still do a lot of childish, silly things.

I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

I probably wouldn't be a songwriter if I didn't grow up the way I did. It was difficult and it was at times very scary to grow up in a household so unsettled and at times very violent. But, it also, I guess it earned me a sort of wisdom at a young age that's served me well.

Many areas of Los Angeles have gang problems.

I won't forget the hood. I won't forget the days of catching a bullet on the way to the mailbox or bricks with death threats that somehow made their way through the window.

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Chicago is a rough city. It made me raw.

When my dad passed, I felt like I had to grow up very quickly.

Most people my age are dead at the present time and you can look it up.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Chicago is like a warzone. Chicago is worse than some of the people that you report, in some of the places that you report about every night, in the Middle East.

I had to grow up very quickly.

We're all painfully aware of how suddenly violence can occur, how crippling it is, and how survivors have to find a way back from that.

I was an outsider as a kid, and I grew up around a lot of violence.

When I was four or five, I had an older brother who got paralyzed from the neck down in junior high school. Some kid did a wrestling fall on him and hit his spine. We had to take care of him. I went from being the baby to not really being the baby anymore.

Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.