Born

Hip hop originated from the Bronx specifically; that means everything. I'm down the block from where hip hop was born and raised, so I'm glad I am here and I'm able to represent New York the way I am.

I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.

My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families second families, perhaps I should say.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut throats are born to be hanged.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with a man is what he makes of himself.

Dumbness comes from the fact that a child is born deaf and that it consequently never learns how to articulate, for it is by the medium of hearing that such instruction is acquired.

I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.

I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.

I know what it's like to access the privilege of a ZIP Code but also be born in one that could have destined me to something else.

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains daisy chains of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between 'his,' 'her' or 'their' wish and yours.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.