Helen Craig Quotes

Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.

I grew up in a little funny town called Xuzhou, in the countryside, very poor. We didn't have hot water. We were four children: three girls and a boy.

We were so poor as kids. I didn't even see a bathtub, running water, hot water, commode - we didn't have any of that. We started with a humble log house, milk cow, garden-raised our own food, killed a hog every year in the fall, and had the meat hanging up in the smokehouse - that was our childhood, me and ol' Si.

I grew up in a house with no running water, 16 miles from the closest place that had a post office. I had a very parochial view of the world.

When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.

I grew up in a mud house, in a small village.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.

I was eating beans by candle light for a decade.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

I was an only child. We were so poor, my parents and I had the same room.

As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.

I was born in Saratoga, Texas, a little town there in the Big Thicket about 60 miles north of Beaumont. Needless to say, we were very, very poor, but we always managed to have enough to keep our bellies full.

I grew up in a trailer park in Bellingham, Washington.

During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had.

I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela, from a very poor family. I grew up in a palm tree house with an earthen floor.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

I was 20 years old. My entire possessions consisted of $5 and a sewing machine.

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn't even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.

We had very few things. I had a couple pairs of jeans, a couple shirts. And same with my mom and sister. I think my sister had, like, two toys. We were living off of instant noodles.

My mom had to be resourceful. She grew up dirt poor in rural Louisiana.

Environment does shape you. My environment, in a pit family, in a pit village, with nine kids in total.

I grew up with very little. I remember vividly using buckets of water to shower.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.