Lisa Joy Quotes

My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I'd say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

I didn't try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave us a comfortable living. As I was their only child, they wanted me to become a pharmacist. But my own preference would have been to study philosophy and mathematics.

Everyone from my high school and junior college are now doctors and lawyers. I came from that kind of environment, but I chose to go on another path, even though I did promise my parents that I would get a degree. After that, I could do anything I wanted; that was the deal.

I remember that when I was little, my parents felt that I should study to become a teacher. They thought football was a waste of time and I'd never succeed at it.

In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn't sit too well with them!

Once I accepted music was my path, I rebelled by wanting to do it my own way. I also didn't think it was respectful to my father's career and creativity to assume that I could jump on the back of all he had worked his entire life for.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Being from a very traditional Chinese-American family, my parents believed the only options to have a successful life were to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a business person.

When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law - in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' And I'd have to say 'Dr. Chen.'

I rebelled by not getting straight A's and not following the path that my elder sister did. She was valedictorian and is very exemplary in her way. I look a lot like her, so I just had to do the opposite. Not that I got bad grades, but I was all about performance and just finding any way that I could to be involved in any kind of production.

My parents always knew that I loved music. They just didn't think I'd try to make it a career. They thought I'd be a painter or an art teacher or something like that.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

I'm from a family of bankers and businessmen, and here I am, the artist, the black sheep.

My dad wanted me to go down a more academic route. He is very much about sticking to the rule book and sticking to the blueprint of a successful career.

Both of my parents graduated from high school, both attended college, both have government jobs now. They've always been very adamant about me finishing high school and finishing college.

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

My parents themselves both went to university, and they very much expected me to be an intellectual and go through further education, and it's to kind of their surprise that I became an athlete.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

I did fine in school. School was cool until I started personally rebelling.

In fact, both my parents were doctors but I was a duffer.

Both my parents are well educated; my father worked for the CBI before becoming a businessman, and my mother was a civil surgeon. But I did not want to be a doctor.

My parents wanted me to get a degree.