Top 32 Quotes About Growing Up Poor
#1. We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.
Justine Kurland
#2. Growing up, I never felt deprived. I was always happy. It seems only lately I've started seeing everything I didn't have.
Kasie West
#3. My parents were very poor, but we never felt any sense of need or want. It was a very close, loving, tightly-knit family growing up, and I never felt any sense of deprivation or anything like that.
George J. Mitchell
#4. Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else.
George Foreman
#5. My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
J. C. Watts
#6. I think evil is our collective shadow. Each one of us has a tendency for the diabolical. If I put you in inhumane conditions, if you're not educated, if you're extremely poor, if you're humiliated, then as a child if you suffer abuse, then you will manifest even when you grow up.
Deepak Chopra
#7. I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf.
Philipp Meyer
#8. My parents came from a poor background and worked their way up because of education. They saw it as a way to succeed. So they cared about me getting straight A grades when I was growing up.
Jennifer Garner
#9. We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.
James Green Somerville
#10. There was a nobility in poverty when I was growing up. My mom was poor but she was planting roses and she was cleaning the steps, you know what I mean. You didn't feel sorry for yourself.
Ricky Gervais
#11. When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.
Ha-Joon Chang
#12. When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.
Marian Keyes
#13. I'm from a middle class family. I didn't grow-up rich, but I didn't grow-up poor. Each guy has to stick to his own story.
SonReal
#14. When you grow up poor, you have to either work really hard to try and get where you want to be, or you'll just stay put.
Dat Phan
#15. At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
Barbara Kingsolver
#16. You can't break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don't take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.
Will Smith
#17. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
Cory Booker
#18. I don't want there to be this separation between the rich and poor. I may be part of the three percent because I've been fortunate and done well for myself, but I will never forget about the 97 percent. That was me growing up. I was so poor I dreamt about being just 'regular poor,' not 'poor, poor.'
Marlon Wayans
#19. Where else but in America can a poor black man like Michael Jackson grow up to be a rich white woman?
Red Buttons
#20. When we were growing up, we were so poor that our heritage was the only thing we had. Mama would say, 'Kids, pour more water in the soup. Better days are coming.'
Ashley Judd
#21. I'm terrified of being poor, I always have been. It's growing up as a Methodist. I'll spend that bit of extra money to get a better seat on a train sometimes, because it's quieter and calmer, but I refuse to spend money on clothes.
Kevin McCloud
#22. I'm a strong supporter of comfort breeds complacency. Growing up poor I wasn't comfortable, my mom had to work so hard and I woke up one day and decided I was not going to come home until I could help her pay the bills.
Farrah Gray
#24. I was so poor growing up ... if I wasn't a boy ... I'd have nothing to play with.
Rodney Dangerfield
#25. We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.
Matt Kemp
#26. If you grow up poor you're always going to worry about money, no matter how successful or lucky you become. I'm not moaning about what actors get paid - I'm very, very lucky - but the difference between what leading actors get paid and supporting actors get is a lot.
Jason Flemyng
#27. When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.
Mr. T
#28. I've an enormous respect for my mother who at the age of 39 raised three children, and I grew up with my grandmother in the household. And so it was a really strong household of women - my poor brother! It was great growing up with so many generations of women.
Cate Blanchett
#29. We weren't poor growing up on Long Island, but it wasn't lavish - just a regular middle-class house.
Criss Angel
#30. I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.
Moby
#31. I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.
Edwidge Danticat
