Wernher von Braun Quotes

The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.

Everybody thought I was a bit of an eccentric for wanting to be out there looking at the stars, but I still do.

I was the - my trendsetting moment was my bar mitzvah had the first, like, temporary tattoo guy.

Growing up, others girls wanted to dance and help their mums with the cooking. I liked to play soccer with the boys. Or I'd be off on my own, tilting mirrors towards the sun in order to burn armies of ants. That was my idea of fun.

It was probably my parents who inspired me most. My father was a scientist and answered my scientific questions, while my mother took me on walks and showed me birds and plants. She also took me out at night and showed me the constellations and the aurora.

I was a real weird kid.

My parents are very quirky, eccentric. They have their own world.

Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.

One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.

When I was 13, I remember crying on my mum's shoulder when my first girlfriend dumped me via MSN Messenger. That was cold.

I dyed my hair pink when I was fifteen.

I was a kid with a lot of different, strange interests - kind of crazy.

I never really wanted to grow up. I grew up really young. I moved out when I was 13 - that's when I started acting.

I think I am naturally attracted to things that are a little bit out of this world.

When I was about 12 or 13, my father gave me 'The Little Prince.' He was making sure that I knew it was a special book. I'd seen the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but to me it seemed a very French name, and I was not excited about him as a person.

Growing up in New Jersey, bat mitzvas were all about the elegant parties.

In a lot of ways, I wasn't a normal teenager.

If I had a time machine, I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.

The biggest lesson I learned from my dad is to support children even if they're doing something that is unorthodox.

I've been a weirdo since I was a kid.

No matter how good you are, at some point your kids are gonna have to create their own independence and think that Mom and Dad aren't cool, just to establish themselves. That's what adolescence is about. They're gonna go through that no matter what.

Everyone has their thing, and I was the weird, artsy kid.

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.