A Quote by Peg Bracken

One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.
You're giving up. You're slipping into being miserable and if you are being miserable, then it's all about you again. But it's not all about you. Love doesn't work that way.
Maybe I'd never see him again... maybe he'd gone for good... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about... Ah, it's an awful thing... and being young doesn't help any... when you notice for the first time... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again... never again... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams... that it's all over... finished... that you too will get lost someday... a long way off but inevitably... in the awful torrent of things and people... of the days and shapes... that pass... that never stop.
You have heard me say, a great many times, that there is not that man or woman in this Church, and there never was and never will be, who turn up their noses at the counsel that is given them from the First Presidency, but who, unless they repent of and refrain from such conduct will eventually go out of the Church and go to hell, every one of them
I've never wanted to be anything other than an actor. I started performing on Broadway when I was 8 years old. My first night on stage, I told my mom, "This is what I want to do. I was always a very out-there kid. The sad thing about acting business is it's so fleeting. If I couldn't do that, I was going to go to school and study law and become a lawyer. But I probably would have been miserable, or they would have had some very theatrical court sessions.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids!
I wrote my first song when I was four, and I played it at my piano recital.
It didn't matter if it was the Catholic Church or Episcopal Church or Presbyterian Church and it still doesn't today. I just like the tradition of having a place to go and connect to a higher power and feel gratitude, and I think that's helpful however you find it.
I'm spiritual. I'm religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic but I go to a Presbyterian Church. Occasionally I go to the Catholic church too. I take communion. I haven't transferred my membership or anything.
If you mess up the performance on stage, you do it again the next night. You're like alright, you let yourself off the hook, and you've got to go back in there. Whereas, with a film, I would go home and be like, "Well, I've ruined the arc of the character forever. That scene is never going to work. I know because I can never shoot it again." So, it's all miserable, but in different ways.
Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it al out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.
I never took any kind of vocal lessons or teachings of how to - I never even took piano lessons. And a voice just came to me and said, go play the piano in the church.
You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop.
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right.
And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
I've grown up with a piano in the house, and that's where I started to be able to learn things by ear. Guitar kind of happened, and I was using it just for writing at first. Then, I was writing so much that I began to realise that I knew how to play, and that's when I started getting nerdy about it.
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