being poor Quotes

“Born poor, raised poor, expect to die poor unless I manage to get us something out of what Big Daddy leaves when he dies of cancer!”

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.

“Let our hearts admit, “I am poor and weak. Satan is too subtle, too cunning, too powerful; he watches constantly for advantages over my soul. The world presses in upon me with all sorts of pressures, pleas, and pretences.”

“It’s an accepted fact that there are an uncanny amount of Ramen noodles and dried pastas on college campuses, which provide cheap nutrition for students, thus allowing them to afford more beer. This point yet another finger at the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s influence. Clearly, He is at work in our institutions of higher learning, and this can only bode well for the country’s future.”

“He who has no money is poor; he who has nothing but money is even poorer.”

“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”

“That was the key to my grandmother’s jewel box, that she got from Florence. It was made of red leather and it fell to bits at last, but she kept the key and gave it to me. She was most terribly poor when she died, poor old sweetie, and kept crying because she had nothing to leave me, so in the end I said I’d rather have this little key than all the jewels in the world.”

“Nobody knew exactly why Wanda sat in the seat unless it was because she came all the way from Boggins Heights, and her feet were usually caked with dry mud that she picked up coming down the country roads.”

“Wanda didn’t have any friends. She came to school alone and went home alone. She always wore a faded blue dress that didn’t hang right. It was clean, but it looked as though it had never been ironed properly.”

“Looking back, I remember telling my daughters that we didn’t have money, pizzazz and a lot of the things we have today, but we had so much love and we lived like millionaires.”

“Maybe a goat. Or a small pig. The family has so little, and bride prices have come down so much. The girl wouldn’t need any jewelry.”

“But that’s what being poor does to you; it shortens your childhood. It hardens your ambition.”

“His family are poor and struggle to make ends meet and with his first communion approaching his father and grandfather carry out a theft to pay for the party.”

“People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.”

“The children never went to the country or lake in the summer, the way their friends did, because their father was dead and their mother worked very hard on the newspaper, the one almost nobody on the block took.”

“She dressed simply, being unable to afford anything better, but she was every whit as unhappy as any daughter of a grand family who has come down in the world.”

“No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.”