Debra Granik Quotes

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.

By-and-large, these are families that are just waiting to get out of here. They are frustrated; I would be, too. I get frustrated at the cash register counter when the paper runs out.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

Poverty is an open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.

As I have traveled the state, I have seen firsthand that there are Arizonans who are hurting.

Many people assume that since New Jersey is a wealthy state with a high per capita income that a lot of these issues of poverty and hunger don't exist, and the fact is that they do.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

America stands as a beacon of hope and the possibility of a better life - but it is also a nation where nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

In Latin America, you don't do things for the money because there is no money.

You know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of poverty also. Regardless about what you hear about the viceroy and people being rich, et cetera.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.