A Quote by Philippe Petit
If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That's when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics.
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My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.
I'll say - I have four kids! I married a woman when I was 24 years old. She was 13 years my senior. She had been married twice before. I adopted them. I was 24 and had a 17-year-old son instantly, an 11-year-old daughter, a 5-year-old, and a child on the way. So I had to learn how to become a parent very quickly.
My parents never pushed me to ski race. It was my choice and something I really wanted to do. I would have rebelled if they had pushed me, and I wouldn't have had the same passion.
I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.
I did go to Beijing, with a two-year assignment. I stayed four years. And those four years were the most formative four years in my life. What I learned was more than I would have learned in 10 years in America or Europe, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister -- they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed.
We have had eight years of consistent and persistent attacks on those four years in government - and on me, personally, but that does not matter - by people who were collectively responsible for those four years.
I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.
Environment is a sculptor - a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.
I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.
My dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico... and had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. He lived there for a number of years. I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.
You love the way it makes me feel when I can't catch my breath Like walkin' on a high wire, Lord, it scares me half to death You're always high above me and I'm always fallin' down Our loves just a circus baby, and I'm just the clown
There was a TV special every year called 'Circus of the Stars,' and I did three consecutive ones - one as a juggler, one as a high-wire performer, and one as a high hand balance.
It would be very, very dangerous for a wire walker to experience fear while he is balancing on the wire. Fear has its place on earth, before and maybe after a high-wire walk, but not during for me.
What people don't realize is that I've been trying to get to Bethlehem since I was four years old. By that, I mean I've been trying to attain perfection since I was kid. And it took me more than 40 years to learn that it wasn't going to happen.
My parents weren't involved in show business, but my parents would show me. We'd watch old films in the house. Little film festivals of Westerns and stuff like that when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to be those guys in those movies before I knew what being an actor was.
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