A Quote by Lois Lowry
When I was a kid in the '50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don't recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.
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I think that I recall the nostalgic '50s: the start of early television and rock-and-roll, and I think everything seemed to get very generic. Not much has changed.
I know most people don't like to be around teenagers but I do. I'm one of the only people I can think of who can't wait for my kid to be a teenager. I think being a teenager is one of the most wonderful things in the world. I really enjoyed it - just this heightened emotional state where everything is beautiful and everything is new and you're convinced that you're really going to break the mould and be different from your parents. And the best part is that you have so much more time that you didn't have as a child.
When you are single, you're invested in the world because you have to be, because that's all you've got. When you have a kid, it's not more or less; it's just a different way of worrying about the world. And worrying about the world after I'm dead.
Suddenly we have a baby who poops and cries, and we are trying to calm, clean up, and pin things together all at once. Then as fast as we learn to cope--so soon--it is hard to recall why diapers ever seemed so important. The frontiers change, and now perhaps we have a teenager we can't reach.
When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.
I saw one of the absolute truths of this world: each person is worrying about himself; no one is worrying about you. He or she is worrying about whether you like him, not whether he likes you. He is worrying about whether he looks prepossessing, not whether you are dressed correctly. He is worrying about whether he appears poised, not whether you are. He is worrying about whether you think well of him, not whether he thinks well of you. The way to be yourself ... is to forget yourself.
California has become the first American state where there is no majority race, and we're doing just fine. If you look around the room, you can see a microcosm of what we can do in the world. . . . You should be hopeful on balance about the future. But it's like any future since the beginning of time -- you're going to have to make it.
We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?
In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the '70s or something.
I spent so much of my time when I was growing up just worrying about what people thought of me, about my appearance, how I should act in school, how to... be popular and all that rubbish. Stop worrying about everything. Everything's going to be okay.
Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.
Now, the United States' response, the western response to this is a continuation of the appeasement that was started back in the '50s with Eisenhower when Iran seized western oil companies. The Americans, the British, and the Israelis, as I remember, launched an attack to try to reclaim it and - or at least the British and the Israelis did and Eisenhower vetoed it.
To a young kid growing up in Canada, America seemed to be crazy about the future; dazzled by it.
Napoleon might have understood Dwight D. Eisenhower, who fought not even a hundred and fifty years after Waterloo. But I don't think Eisenhower could even begin to wrap his mind around drone warfare, spy satellites, or any of the technology that now defines the security of our world.
Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.
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