Brandy Norwood

I can’t believe Tina Turner actually was on the same stage. I can’t believe I set foot on the same stage, and it’s going to be an album, people are going to buy it, and it’s going to be a video.

One day it just hit me. This is it. You are not in love. So either stay in it because you have a child or be brave and find the man of your dreams and marry him for real.

The more natural, the better.

Right now, it’s really about my fans knowing that whatever I believed spiritually at the time is what I believed. I just wouldn’t deliberately lie to them just to save my image.

I have so much to talk about. I have so much to share. There are so many different emotions going on inside of me right now.

I love basketball.

I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we’d done it in England, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in America too.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

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

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can’t compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.

I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker’s family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.

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.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

As a kid, I was making a building with blocks in our playroom. I didn’t have enough. So I asked my younger brother Robert if I could borrow some of his. He said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I used all of my blocks, then all of his blocks, and when I was done I had a great building, which I then glued together. Robert never did get those blocks back.

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We’d go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I’ve always been a big animal person.

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.

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.