Brandy Norwood

The more natural, the better.

And I’m looking at him like, ‘Oh my God. This is Michael Jackson’. I fainted, blacked out – like seriously blacked out.

I knew I had to make a sacrifice to do what I’ve always wanted to do.

I was rapping as a hobby. It was something I did for my friends and just played around on ideas and stuff like that.

I’ll be a nun, raise my daughter, and make albums.

I’ve just got to get that album out. I have to get it out, if it’s the last thing I do.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That’s what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep… Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.

I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I’ve improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.

When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart: And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

We weren’t wealthy but we definitely weren’t poor. We were incredibly rich because there was a wonderful community in Shepherd’s Bush, where I grew up. All my friends were into villainy and crime.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.