Once A Kid Quotes & Sayings

Is it okay to hate a dead kid? Even if you loved him once? Even if he was my best friend? Is it okay to hate him for being dead? — A.S. King

A kid once said to me "Do you get hangovers?" I said, "To get hangovers you have to stop drinking. — Lemmy Kilmister

Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line. — Matthew Quick

When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything and play anything. I just felt super-confident. And then, once I started to play music professionally, maybe it's from being from a small town, but you grow up and then you're suddenly a big fish in a small pond, and I realized that there were a billion other drummers out there that could play as good as you or better, and everybody wants that job. — Patty Schemel

When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside. — Mike D

In general I was a good kid. It usually took a lot to make me mad. But once I reached the boiling point, I lost all rational control. Totally without thinking, when my anger was aroused, I grabbed the nearest brick, rock, or stick to bash someone. It was as if I had no conscious will in the matter. — Ben Carson

I think about pinball, and how being a kid's like being shot up the firing lane and there's no veering left or right; or you're just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you're sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there's a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed'll totally alter what happens to you later, so a fraction of an inch to the right, and the ball'll just hit a pinger and a dinger and fly down between your flippers, no messing, a waste of 10 p. But a fraction to the left and it's action in the play zone, bumpers and kickers, ramps and slingshots and fame on the high-score table. — David Mitchell

Usually at least once in a person's childhood we lose an object that at the time is invaluable and irreplaceable to us, although it is worthless to others. Many people remember that lost article for the rest of their lives. Whether it was a lucky pocketknife, a transparent plastic bracelet given to you by your father, a toy you had longed for and never expected to receive, but there it was under the tree on Christmas ... it makes no difference what it was. If we describe it to others and explain why it was so important, even those who love us smile indulgently because to them it sounds like a trivial thing to lose. Kid stuff. But it is not. Those who forget about this object have lost a valuable, perhaps even crucial memory. Becuase something central to our younger self resided in that thing. When we lost it, for whatever reason, a part of us shifted permanently. — Jonathan Carroll

It was like giving a homeless kid a night in a luxury hotel. It only made a bad situation worse. Once a person knows that kind of pleasure, they just wanted it again. And again. — Santino Hassell

Robin was a great kid. Smarter than her father at eight years old. She liked the oddest things. Like the instructions for a toy more than the toy itself. The credits of a movie instead of the movie. The way something was written. An expression on my face. Once she told me I looked like the sun to her, because of my hair. I asked her if I shined like the sun, and she told me, 'No, Daddy, you shine more like the moon, when it's dark outside. — Josh Malerman

Except that wasn't all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field, dropping in someone's yard, on a tree or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I'd read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner has his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn't a rule. That was a custom. — Khaled Hosseini

I saw a drummer play once when I was a kid and I thought, that's really cool. You know, you're moving. You're using your arms and fingers. So I tried it and I loved it. — Bill Kreutzmann

You should always give 100%. If you do that then no-one can ask any more of you. Someone once said to me when I was a kid: 'If you're asked to do ten sprints, by all means do 11 but never do nine because you're only cheating yourself'. — Alan Shearer

Once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file. They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did - and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?
— John Barnes

I don't think I like that boy." He growled, glaring for effect, just in case I hadn't figured out his oh-so-subtle interpersonal cues.
"He's a sweet kid," I insisted, folding the gray blazer over my arm.
"He's a teenage boy," Cal said, his dark eyes narrowed. "They're all sexual deviants under the surface. I should know. I was a teenage boy once."
"Thousands of years ago," I countered.
"Times may change, but testosterone does not. — Molly Harper

If you really like a movie these days, you don't watch it once, especially if you're a kid, because you have a different relationship with media. You expect that to be on your hard drive, and it will look just as good, any time you watch it. It's not like VHS, where you watched it a certain amount of times and it started fading away. — Joseph M. Kahn

Being politicians, they all got to sharing their personal stories. Obama talked about his mother's battle with cancer. Harry Reid talked about a kid with a cleft palate. And John McCain told how he once carried a brain dead woman through an entire campaign. — Bill Maher

When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line. And I thought how maybe once there was, say, a princess who lost her mother's ring in a forest, and how in some other galaxy a strange creature might fall, screaming, on the shore of a red lake, and how right at that second there could be a man standing at a window overlooking a busy street, aiming a loaded revolver, but how it was just me, there, after Chris, staring at that turtle in the fourth-grade room and wondering if it would die before I stopped being able to see it. — Deborah Eisenberg

When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn't imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I'm gone for six days it feels like too much. — Adam Carolla

It seems like I always wrote, I just didn't think of it as a career choice. I just liked to tell stories ... to myself, to pen pals (I had a lot of them, all over the world). Of course this was in the days before computers were everywhere, and anyone could access the Web. You had to make an effort keeping up a correspondence, and the arrival of the mail once a day was a big deal. I think if modern technology had been around when I was a kid, I would never have left my bedroom except to take the dogs out for their run three times a day. — Charles De Lint

Hi!'
The chirpy little voice greeted me with such energised enthusiasm it made me jump nearly a foot out of my seat. I turned around, expecting to see the usual cocky little Bezzer-in-training Tyler, who every once in a while enjoys pissing off as many people on the bus as possible, but to my surprise it was the scruffy little quiet Year 7 who sits at the front of the bus with his big orange hair bouncing around.
'Hello,' I replied dubiously. (You can't assume that a kid isn't intending to give you grief just because he has ginger hair, not these days. What is the world coming to?) — Tom Clempson

I guess I am basically most comfortable when I'm alone. As a kid, I was very much a loner. I love long distance running and long distance biking. A director once pointed out that those are all very isolated exercises you do for hours at a time. — Kevin Conroy

He held his hand out, palm up, watching her with soft, penetrating eyes, deep, dark eyes that called to her the longer she stared at them. "How 'bout you give me the benefit of the doubt every once in a while, hmm? I'd like a chance to prove I'm not that stupid kid anymore. — J.M. Stewart

Someone once accused me of slumming. I don't know what that means. I play basketball. And through that, I get to see a world that is not smart-kid world. — Nick McDonell

My 13-year-old daughter leaves the house at 7:15 every morning and takes a smelly city bus to school way uptown. It's like 8 degrees out, and it's dark and she's got this morning face and I send her out there to take a bus. Meanwhile, my driver is sitting in a toasty Mercedes that's going to take me to work once both kids are gone. I could send her in the Mercedes and then have it come back to get me, but I can't have my kid doing that. I can't do that to her. Me? I earned that f - ing Mercedes. You better f - ing believe it. — Louis C.K.

I'm a big kid. I love drinking chocolate milk. I'm not afraid to watch some cartoons once in a while when I'm with my nieces and actually be attentive. — Billy Horschel

I held out a lead figurine of Hades - the little Mythomagic statue Nico had abandoned when he fled camp last winter.
Nico hesitated. "I don't play that game anymore. It's for kids."
"It's got four thousand attack power," I coaxed.
"Five thousand," Nico corrected. "But only if your opponent attacks first."
I smiled. "Maybe it's okay to still be a kid once in a while. — Rick Riordan

Most people can't wait to leave kidhood behind. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It's a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt. — Dean Koontz

Once a bird kid, always a bird kid. - maximum ride series — James Patterson

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out-it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining. — Diane Arbus

As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns. — Stephen King

Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it ... Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? ... For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them. — Colson Whitehead

Or perhaps Zeus was just messing with me again - giving me a taste of my old power before yanking it away once more. Remember this, kid? WELL YOU CAN'T HAVE IT! — Rick Riordan

In TV, kid roles are like this: You're either in a couple minutes of an episode playing somebody's kid, or you get in these procedurals where you're crying or you're playing a witness or you're playing a crazy person. Every once in a while you get a big guest star role, but there's a formula to those TV shows. — Kyle Gallner

As a little kid, Peter had figured that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you'd need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn't how it worked. — Tommy Wallach

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire. — Stephen King

I was extremely unpopular at school. Once the hardest kid in school beat me up and there was a plan for about 30 other kids to kick me in the face once I was down. Good times! — Oliver Sykes

Where once such devices were relegated to appropriate times, now they've become necessities. The other day I watched a kid come off the school bus listening to music on his headphones, oblivious to the traffic zooming past him. And I can't even begin to count the times I've thought pet owners were talking to their dogs while taking them for a walk when, in reality, they were blabbing on their cell phones. It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past, ... It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience as opposed to just when you're jogging. — Robert Novak

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn't need a prod.) But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that's difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won't comply. But offer a reward that's enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal "is doomed to give it again in the second." There's no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What's more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you'll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance. — Daniel H. Pink

Go on, glare your eyes at me, and cry and plead, and talk to
me about money and what it can buy. But it can't buy back a child once he's dead! — V.C. Andrews

It's very important, once you are a parent, that you educate your kid day by day. — Ana Tijoux

Believe me, once you lose a kid in a New York City park, atheist or not, you start talking to God right away. — Jim Gaffigan

When I was a kid and I'd be in trouble. I'd ask God to help me, and then once the fire was out, I wouldn't talk to Him anymore. When I got older, I began to find I needed some help spiritually, just to function. — Stephen Adly Guirgis

she sees them, again and again, all lighting at once, filling up the winter-naked trees, shockwave riders on the moving edge of nature's most violent season, she sees them take wing again and again, the flutter of their wings like the snap of many sheets on the line, and she thinks: A month from now every kid in Derry Park will have a kite, they'll run to keep the strings from getting tangled with each other. She thinks again: This is what flying is like. — Stephen King

I was a '90s kid, so I missed 'Jem and the Holograms.' But once I delved into the whole world of it, I realized it's iconic. There's incredible dancing in the movie, too. — Aubrey Peeples

Childhood only comes around once. Make your child's memories special. Take them on a new adventure each day. It is as simple as opening a book. — K. Lamb

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. — Heather O'Neill

He's teaching her arithmetic,
He said it was his mission,
He kissed her once and said,
"Now that's addition."
And as he added smack by smack
In silent satisfaction,
She sweetly gave the kisses back and said,
"Now that's subtraction."

Then he kissed her, she kissed him,
Without an explanation,
And both together smiled and said,
"That's multiplication."
Then Dad appeared upon the scene and
Made a quick decision.
He kicked that kid three blocks away And said, "That's long division! — Dan Clark

Once you have a kid, it's amazing how quickly people ask, 'So are you going to stop at just one?' — Ned Vizzini

Being a parent is a life sentence. You see, that's why normal people should not have children. Because, if you raise a kid with only love and support, I guarantee that kid will be in rehab by the time he is sixteen. Why ? Because you never introduced him to mister back-of-your-hand. You know why I only broke into a liquor store once ? 'Cos my father introduced me to mister back-of-his-hand. And it's wiley side-kick. Mister foot-in-my-ass. — Christopher Titus

Six out of seven times we landed successfully [on the Moon]. I wanted to be a part of that and I was a part of that, so my personal feeling is of great gratefulness for having somehow been in a position to have been given the opportunity to be on that first landing. That's a marvelous experience for a little kid that grew up in New Jersey. So I'm very thankful, and I asked the whole world to give thanks once we successfully landed. — Buzz Aldrin

When I started acting, it was like a double identity crisis - your basic crisis, compounded by people saying, 'there goes Robards' kid, Bacall's kid.' Now I realize, sure, that gets your foot in the door, but once it's there, it's your foot. I'm not bothered anymore. I'm confident of my abilities. — Sam Robards

So how big were his teeth? Are we talking big bad wolf?"
"Did you read The Beano when you were a kid?"
"Yeah, once or twice."
"Picture Dennis the Menace's dog Gnasher with an elderly human face and you've nailed Norman. I think he must have been a larger man when he had the choppers made. His face has shrunk with age, but the teeth have stayed the same. — Fabian Black

Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. As a child you don't understand that you can win, but that's it's not always worth the price. Once you understand and accept that possibility you become a real grown up, and the world becomes a much more serious place. Not less fun, but once you realize what can go wrong, it's a lot scarier to go hunting "bears". — Laurell K. Hamilton

Also because I'm always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we'll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid. My husband doesn't believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese. — Jenny Offill

Everybody wants to be a professional baseball player and, sure, as a kid, I wanted to do that. But once I got cut from my high school team, I figured there wasn't much chance of that ever happening. I'm still in awe of it. — Mark Buehrle

I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track ... ' and so on. — Steve Vai

One day I saw something very strange, people walking around who looked like they had come directly from the grave, their skin was so pale. Mzungus. They carried a black machine that flashed bright when they pointed it at me. I screamed. I thought the machine was going to harm me, and so I fled. Later I learned it was a camera. Its flash and their voices terrified me. We didn't see them often, less than once in a year. But whenever I saw them, I ran and hid.
I had many ideas about them; first, I did not expect them to be smart, because they loved to take pictures of silly things like chickens on the street, shanties, and other things that were not interesting. Second, since I had seen a kid touching their skin and shouting, "How are you?," for many years I believed the name for all white people was "How are you?" I touched their skin as well and found it soft, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed because I thought touching it would leave a mark on my skin too. — Kennedy Odede

But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It's a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt. Nurse — Dean Koontz

In my parents' house, nothing was ever thrown away. Clothes piled up, formed drifts that grew into mountains Philip, Baron, and I would climb and leap from. The heaps of garments filled the hallway and chased my parents out of their own bedroom, so that they eventually slept in the room that was once Dad's office. Empty bags and boxes filled gaps in the clutter, boxes that once held rings and sneakers and clothes. A trumpet that my mother wanted to make into a lamp rested atop a stack of tattered magazines filled with articles Dad planned to read, near the heads and feet and arms of dolls Mom promised she would stitch together for a kid from Carney, all beside an endless heap of replacement buttons, some still in their individual glassine bags. A coffeemaker rested on a tower of plates, propped up on one end to keep coffee from flooding the counters. — Holly Black

Mostly they're harmless, but I've never seen them so agitated." "They're staring at me," Percy said. "That ghost kid called me Greggus. My name isn't Greg." "Graecus," Hazel said. "Once you've been here awhile, you'll start understanding Latin. Demigods have a natural sense for it. Graecus means Greek. — Rick Riordan

Once there was a little old lady who lived next-door. I was eleven when I decided to kill her. But I didn't. As an eleven-year-old I was shocked, upset and angry enough to take the life of the frail-looking, white-haired woman, but I lacked the ingenuity and resolve to put a plan into action. It's easy to want to kill someone but hard to actually do it. Especially when you're a kid. That's why I waited until I was eighteen. — G.H. Finn

When I was a little kid I wanted to be an artist or a painter. But once I got into boxing, all I wanted was to box. — Emanuel Steward

My worst job ever, this was when I was a kid, was picking potatoes on the back of a trailer in March. It was freezing, absolutely freezing. We had to sort the good ones from the bad ones. Once you do that for a day in March in the north of England, it makes you think there must be better jobs than this! — Ben Miles

I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye. — Kristina Adams

There was a period in my life when I was eating ramen non-stop. These days, less so. Once you have a kid, you end up eating a lot of foods with broccoli in them. — Erez Lieberman Aiden

Now I have a shot at being the Planet's Funniest Kid Comic. "The planet Earth?" asks Phineas of - you guessed it - Phineas and Ferb. "Or Mars? We built a portal to Mars for the science fair once. — James Patterson

Once you realise you're never going to be a somebody, you have to kid yourself that being a nobody can still be interesting. — Ian Pattison

I'd go back, yeah. I don't care, I got a kid, man - I'll sell tampons. I mean, there's no selling-out once you get a kid. I got a kid. — Jay Mohr

As a kid, I lived in a fantasy world. I used to believe ants could talk. Not once did they say thank you. — Willard Wigan

Maybe it's okay to still be a kid every once in a while. — Rick Riordan

I don't look to celebrities for style anymore because I've learned the chain of command. They are being dressed by a stylist who's getting inspiration from a 16-year-old kid running the streets of Melbourne, Australia. Once I learned that chain of command, I just started taking it to the streets. — Lizzo

I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well - his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun - and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then. — Edison McDaniels

Once you hit 40, being in a band - a committee voting constantly on what you're going to be doing next month - it's more of a challenge. And when you have a kid as well. — Dean Wareham

I had a couple of really cool friends when I was a kid, and we'd find cool music and movies and show them to each other. My friend Dennis had a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and he'd already seen it once, and he was like, 'We need to watch this.' I was sleeping over his house - and I think we were literally 15 - and we watched it. — Gerard Way

Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store! — Phillip Noyce

We only live once, and how would you want to be remembered? I have kids. I have, due to my job, a probably higher responsibility to do good things in my life. But also, since I was a kid, I love doing things out of context, helping friends, being different, being a special kind of man is important for me. — Gilles Marini

Having a hangover with small children is never a good idea. I did it once and it was the biggest mistake I've ever made, I've never felt so ill in my life. You have to get out of bed and look after your kid who doesn't care if you've got a sore head. — Sharleen Spiteri

As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe. — Libba Bray

I once caught a bid, I never hit skid,
Never date a girl if the girl got a kid.
Nahhh ... papa's got a brand new bag
And I never hit skinz once they sag. — Grand Puba

Americans. They came right out with things. Hitchens family lore related the tale of how once, when I was but a toddler, my parents were passing with me through an airport and ran into some Yanks. 'Real cute kid,' said these big and brash people without troubling to make a formal introduction. They insisted on photographing me and, before breaking off to resume their American lives, pressed into my dimpled fist a signed dollar bill in token of my cuteness. This story was often told (I expect that Yvonne and the Commander had been to an airport together perhaps three times in their lives) and always with a note of condescension. That was Americans for you: wanting to be friendly all right, but so loud, and inclined to flash the cash. — Christopher Hitchens

Were passing by. Once I heard him making fun of Jules. Jules was walking down the street carrying a lamp in his hand that he'd obviously just pulled out of some garbage heap. "Look at the garbage picker man!" Alphonse said. "That motherfucker is sad. He tried to sell me a comforter once! I said get the hell away from me. He's out all night looking for rags and bones. What year we living in, man? Get a real job, motherfucker." Jules couldn't stand Alphonse either. He said Alphonse was a pimp. I didn't know what a pimp did exactly. I was almost certain that it meant he had prostitutes working for him, but I wasn't sure. I told a kid at school that I knew a pimp and he said, "Bullshit. It's not fucking possible. You're making it up." So I guessed I'd made a mistake. Or maybe the word "pimp" had two different meanings. I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING to make older guys want to treat me like I was one of them, — Heather O'Neill

I think they call that parallas: being able to know the distance of something because you're seeing it from two separate points - and the farther apart those two points are, the more accurate you can be. Put one eye here and one eye fourteen feet away, and you know a whole lot more about the world you're seeing.
The thing is, if you go through life with just your own point of view, you're like that kid with glass eye. If there's something that's right up in your face, it looks really big - overwhelming even. But if you've got that parallax - if you've got that other point of view - you realize that there are bigger, much more important things that are far off toward the horizon. Once you focus on those things rather than the way up close, that close-up stuff becomes nothing more than a nuisance blocking the view. — Neal Shusterman

It is pretty cool to have my own video game. As a kid, growing up, it was something I never even thought of. I thought about just trying to get the new game that was coming out, so that my buddies [and] I, we could all enjoy it together. When I was a kid, never once in my wildest dream
even when I turned pro
that was never something that I really thought about, having my own video game. Thanks to EA, it's a reality. — Tiger Woods

One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End. — Alice Sebold

Once, I was a kid and everyone else was old. The tables will turn. I'll be the guy that kids look at and see as old. Me. Fucking ME. Me, who was once out cruising on Friday nights, staying up until dawn. Me, who thought I was indestructible, who thought I was forever. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I was just one in 6.8 billion, and very much subject to the same laws of time and space as everyone else. — Johnny B. Truant

Life was tough for me. When I was a kid, nobody played with me because they thought I looked ugly with my extra thumb. It pained me. So once I thought of getting it surgically removed. But I didn't. Slowly, I realized that the exterior is not the criterion for love and success. — Hrithik Roshan

He'd noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays - to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser." "I see," I said. "Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who'll listen." "Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat's-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious — James Patterson

When I was a kid I never won anything and when I mentioned it to my mom she looked up from her book and pointed out that I had once been the youngest person in the entire world. Sure, it was only for a millisecond, but it was a record I'd set without even trying. — Jenny Lawson

Help me out here, Jeremy," she said pleadingly.
He gave her a look. "Why should I do that?"
"Because once, nineteen years ago, you were wrong about him, too."
Jeremy stared at her stoically. After a long pause, his face broke into a smile.
"Aw, hell, you crazy kid, you knew I was gonna let you in - I'm a sucker for this stuff. — Julie James

Once you get troops on the streets, it's only a matter of time before it goes bad. Some kid throws a stone, next minute there's houses on fire and people getting killed. — Terry Pratchett

[He] seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn't know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy! (pg.43) — Jon Krakauer

The only problem with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in a while Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it
not often, but once in a while. Eddie had even thought, when in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You're missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in a while. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand.
Sometimes she'd maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, you know? — Stephen King

The first books I remember having an impact on me when I was a kid were L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' books, which were much stranger than the movie: at once rather whimsical and really dark. — Steve Erickson

Are you kidding?" I stop in the middle of the kitchen. Spin around. My face is pulled together in disbelief. "You've spoken to me maybe once in the two weeks I've been here. I hardly even notice you anymore."

"Okay, hold up," he says, turning to block my path. "We both know there's no way you haven't noticed all of this" - he gestures to himself - "so if you're trying to play games with me, I should let you know up front that it's not going to work."

"What?" I frown. "What are you talking abou - "

"You can't play hard to get, kid." He raises an eyebrow. "I can't even touch you. Takes 'hard to get' to a whole new level, if you know what I mean."

"Oh my God," I mouth, eyes closed, shaking my head. "You are insane."

He falls to his knees. "Insane for your sweet, sweet love! — Tahereh Mafi

Sure, kid. Look, there's a very old saying in my family: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is another wizard fucking with you. — Scott Lynch

I remember once, we got an interview, and he said, 'Dad, these people are writing about me like I'm an adult. Don't they know I'm a kid?' I have never tried to encourage him to get a music image like other musicians have. — Ornette Coleman

Humans are really stupid. If we don't fall and get hurt, we won't learn our lesson. Just like a kid repeatedly falling.

No matter how many times we fail, or how many times we've fallen. Humans will stand once again, smiling ruefully at our grazed knees before continuing onwards. This time we will not run from our pain. — Yuuri Eda

He'd figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast. — Christopher McDougall