Gregory Hines Quotes

I think I missed my window." "What window?" "My get-a-life window. I think I was supposed to figure all this stuff out somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-six, and now it's too late.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan.

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.

Drugs, sex, booze, all the stuff that we wanted to do. The problem was that we didn't want to learn the top 40 'cause most of the music was awful and we had this other idea about what we wanted to do.

In '92 - '93, I was at that age when I was looking for my identity and that's when I found dance music and I really fell in love with it.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

I like books that explore identity and youth culture or rites of passage.

Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.

I did LSD and peyote in the late Sixties, before I got into cocaine. That was concurrent with my change from a straight comic to the album and counterculture period, and those drugs served their purpose. They helped open me up.

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

All I want is to become someone new. In this case, Tobias Johnson, son of Evelyn Johnson. Tobias Johnson may have lived a dull and empty life, but he is at least a whole person, not this fragment of a person that I am, too damaged by pain to become anything useful.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

I look back and say, "This must have been somebody else." I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist.

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

I'm still learning who I am. One minute I have black hair, the next it's red. One day I'm wearing Converse sneakers, and the next I'm in the hippie look.

I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.

Twenty-eight to 31 is the tough period. You have to be really careful because it's so cataclysmic, so life-altering. People do really dramatic things like get married, or they'll get divorced. Your chances of committing suicide go way up. It's basically psychic death. You see the signs of it around 27, and you're still on the out-end of it around 31. Everyone I've talked to who's gone through that and come out the other side walks out of it like, "MY LIFE IS GREAT".

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.

and because what we learn in the dark remains all our lives, a noise like the sea, displacing the day's pale knowledge, you'll come to yourself in a glimmer of rainfall or frost, the burnt smell of autumn, a meeting of parallel lines, and know you were someone else for the longest time, pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist, lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.

I experimented with weed, Ecstasy, mushrooms and mescaline for about a year and a half.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

One of my half-sisters just couldn't deal with it. I think she saw me as someone she had a hard time relating to. We're super-close now, but I probably came home from Europe with weird opinions and attitudes and weird clothing. I probably looked so different to her, and I couldn't show up for things she would have liked me to. My life picked up speed, and I couldn't really stop the momentum.