Time & Perspective Quote by Quincy Jones

It lands like a punchline with a bruise underneath: a petty theft story that flips into a lifetime aversion. Quincy Jones isn’t romanticizing “the good old days” of youthful mischief; he’s showing how quickly pleasure turns punitive when you take too much, too fast, for the wrong reasons. The detail that sells it is the box. Not a jar, not a taste - a whole box, a haul big enough to feel like a score. Then the woods: private, unsupervised, a place where kids can binge on impulse and bravado without anyone stepping in to say, “Stop.”

Jones’s voice carries the cadence of a musician’s timing - the setup (“We stole...”), the escalation (“took care of the whole box”), the deadpan aftermath (“20 years”). The humor is dry, but the subtext is serious: excess isn’t glamorous when it leaves you nauseated, ashamed, or simply burned out. “I never wanted to see honey again” isn’t just about taste fatigue; it’s the residue of consequences. Stolen sweetness curdles.

Context matters: Jones came up in an era where hustling and improvising were survival skills, especially for Black kids navigating scarcity and strict authority. This anecdote reads like a micro-lesson in self-regulation: the world will punish you eventually, but sometimes your own body does it first. And it quietly maps onto a career spent mastering appetite - for sound, for attention, for success - without letting the binge ruin the music.