Terry Gross Quotations
Terry Gross Quotes about:
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Lines Quotes
Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private. But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.
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Thinking Quotes
I think there's always an expectation when you're a first generation, especially a first-generation Nigerian, of sort of being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. And so, you know, sort of my initial pursuits into the arts and that I was going to pursue film as a career didn't confuse them, but it was definitely something that they were scared about.
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Mom Quotes
My parents were pretty open about a lot of things, especially my mom. And any kind of little crazy thing I was into, she was very supportive of. You know, whether it was BMX bike racing or being in the Boy Scouts or surfing or anything else, she always seemed to sort of support it. And I think it's because she was an immigrant and that idea of sort of having her kids be able to have access to their dreams and whatever they wanted to follow was very important to her.
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Growing Up Quotes
I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria. And so I always say that I'm literally an African American. So my last name is Famuyiwa, it's different. And so that was a part of my experience from people not being able to pronounce it to not sort of having sort of a shared, common history with a lot of the kids that I was growing up with because my parents were from Africa.
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Differences Quotes
An interesting difference between African-American humor and Jewish humor, in it's kind of basic or maybe most austere type form is, African-American humor, some of it comes out of playing the dozens in which you insult the other person or insult the other person's mother, and so much of Jewish humor is like, you're insulting yourself. It's totally self-deprecating.
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Winning Quotes
And the rules were so clear, you could not deviate from that all. And I think it especially damaged my sisters because there was nothing they could do to get my father's attention, to win his approval. They could not play sports. They could not do these other things. They could not be tough. They could not be macho. And so I think they suffered just from sheer neglect if nothing else.
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Thinking Quotes
I don't think my father noticed that he had daughters. I think, you know, part of the damage of the childhood was, I simply don't think they were acknowledged as human beings at all. Or - you know, one of the reasons I became a cook later on in my life was, I was not allowed to cook an egg.
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Children Quotes
I mean, Dad was one of these people who simply could not lose, you know? He could not stand it when a kid was beating him. He would go crazy when the child came to that moment, which, you know, you have to come to - I mean, Dad played Old Maids like he played football. He just simply had to win every single thing every single time.
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Dad Quotes
We grew up as this family of deniers. And people who knew us for years were stunned when "The Great Santini" came out because we had this appearance of being this happy, large, smiling family. We were taught to smile, put the best face forward. And so when the book ended up - Dad swatting us around the room, no one believed me.
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Children Quotes
The line changed my life 'cause I thought of some poor woman I hadn't even met walking around the United States or the world not knowing she's going to be beaten up by me and these kids, unborn, not knowing they were going to be born into the family of a child-beater just because I was. So it really did have a great effect on me.
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Lines Quotes
So the Great Santini was how he liked being referred to by his children. He would line up his seven children, and there was this ritual we'd go through. And he would say, who's the greatest of them all? And we - the seven - would say, you are, oh, Great Santini. And he would say, who knows all, hears all and sees all? You do, oh, Great Santini. So this was the ridiculous way I was raised.
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Growing Up Quotes
My father modestly referred to himself as the Great Santini when we were growing up. And he took it - I later learned he had seen a high-wire aerialist when he was a boy, and he was up doing acrobatics in his airplane, and when he came down one time - when was a young lieutenant - he said, I was better than the Great Santini today. And some of the other pilots heard it, and the nickname stuck.
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Morning Quotes
Dad mistook - for some reason unbeknownst to me - he mistook his family for a platoon of Marines. I mean, he - the exact same thing he brought to the disciplining of a squadron, a battalion, a platoon, he brought to the disciplining of his children. He ran the house - he had Saturday morning inspections for us, he had white-glove inspections for us as kids.
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Husband Quotes
You know, how am I leading my own life? What am I denying? Since I brought such great powers of denial into my adult life, what am I not doing as a husband? What am I not doing as a father? The whole thing started unraveling with me that once I kept it up close to the chest, I could hold it all in, but once I started letting it out, it all started coming out.
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Thinking Quotes
It seems that's where Bill Clinton came in last night because he told this long story about how they met [with Hillary Clinton], how he courted her, how he bought a house to convince her, I think after the third proposal, to actually marry him. And he talked about her activism and her commitment and everything. And it was as if he could tell the narrative in a way that she couldn't.
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Reading Quotes
When you're reading a newspaper and you're seeing ads on the page, it's not kind of invasive. Like, it's on the page next to the article. You can look at it or not. You can turn the page when you're ready. On the internet, the ads - many of the ads - just are so controlling. They insist that you see them.
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Moving Quotes
I have to match wits with the ads. Like, there's pop-ups that, like, move around and you have to chase them like it was a video game or something. And then there's ads where, like, you know, the X to, like, close the ad screen is so kind of small that you can't find it and you have to actually go looking for it. And so I spend all my energy - instead of, like, absorbing what the advertiser wants to communicate to me, I spend my energy trying to figure out how to defeat the ad.