Prodigy Quotes

I made 'Free Game' based on personal experiences, what I been through, my life, exposing people to the fact that I'm in the streets.

Like everyone else in this world, I have had struggles. There's disappointment and obstacles in everybody's life. I feel like I was writing 'Second Chance' not just for myself, but also for the people who have struggled.

I think everybody faces challenges in their lives. I've definitely been through it - not to the extreme that Astrid did. I try to keep some kind of identity and strength.

Gospel talks about life's struggles, but you always feel like it recognizes these struggles and that you can overcome them.

People go through so much in life - financially, physically, mentally, and emotionally. So I don't look at the ups and downs as anything but a negligible area.

My advice to anyone being picked on for being different or for working towards a dream is to remember it's never personal. These people don't actually dislike you at heart. They're just going through difficult things in their own personal lives.

I think my genre is more 'reality rap'; I talk about my life and the struggles that I've been through.

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.

Gangsta rappers, they call them. Not nearly as gangsta as the things that inspire them.. you know, a gangsta government that we operate under.

Hip-Hop went from selling crack to smoking it

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth.

There are people who have let the problems of today lead them to conclude that for them life is not the way.

When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike... A story is what it's like to be a human being-to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise.

Pain is a byproduct of life. That’s the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That’s true for everyone. But if you don’t face the pain and the suck, you don’t ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

There have been many times when I have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times I have been tempted to suicide, but I am glad I did not give way, for I have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and I still think it may ... It is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. But it is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

Each of us is the sum of our scars.

My music is not for everyone. It's only for the stong-willed, the [street] soldiers music. It's not like party music- I mean, you could gig to it, but it's spiritual. My musi is spiritual. It's like Negro spiituals, except for the fact that I'm not saying 'We shall Overcome.' I'm saying that we are overcome.

We've all got our own brand of problems. You can be pitiful or powerful. Take your pick.

If I wrote a book, I had to be willing at least to talk about some of my struggles, whether in my personal life, health crises, or the deaths of my parents, because there can too easily be a perception of me that my life just went from A to Z uninterrupted, without any ups and downs, and that's not a fair representation.

I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to the realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.

Spiritual growth thrives in the midst of our problems, not in their absence. Spiritual growth occurs in the trenches of life, not in the classroom.