Mary Antin Quotes

I finish so many books it's amazing. I'm also doing Rosetta Stone, learning some French.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.

My folks ain't graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family - and I come from a big family.

We weren't dirt poor, but there was no spare money kicking around. While it was very much understood that the way to a better life was through education, books were a luxury we couldn't afford. But when I was six, we actually moved opposite the central library, and that became my home from home.

I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No. They gave me hope, and they gave me encouragement, and they gave me a vision. That came from my education.

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.

My mother emigrated from Russia as a young child. She couldn't speak English and had no education. Her father died at age 32, leaving the family destitute. An uncle, who worked as a carpenter, supported the family.

My father, he couldn't read or write.

I grew up in poverty and my mother had to sacrifice a lot for us to eat and get an education - just imagine in a house where we were more than six children! But hard work and dedication is what it took for me to be here today.

The public library is where I studied. It's where my grandfather taught himself English.

My mother grew up in abject poverty in Mississippi, an elementary school dropout. Yet, with the support of women around her, she returned to school and graduated as class valedictorian - the only one of her seven siblings to finish high school. She became a librarian and then a United Methodist minister.

My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.

A lot of times I went to sleep hungry, and not because I was cutting weight for a fight.

I've lived in poverty.

It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid.

I was poor my whole life.

Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'

Growing up in a very poor orphanage in Ukraine, there wasn't much food.

The important thing is that you 'read!'

I come from a humble background, where my family was struggling to be called middle class.

Mum obviously did not earn much money to feed me and my siblings. She worked hard to raise us, but there was always something missing.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

I can't learn Swedish to save my life. I tried, but I'm not very good at it.