Ann Kirkpatrick Quotes

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

In Maine, there is a deeply ingrained sense that you can always get a little more use out of something.

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.

Coming from a big family, I learned a lot. Things don't have to be perfect. You can do okay with 'almost.'

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less.

I don't live for stuff and things, and if I had to live in a cardboard box, I would put curtains on it.

We never complained, 'We don't have this or that.' Even though we had to plant certain things and harvest them to be able to eat, we never complained.

I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.

When you cannot have something, you make what you have work.

My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with a certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I'm still thrifty.

For some reason I am one of those people who act like they were born and raised during the Depression.

You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There's nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.

I was eating beans by candle light for a decade.

My life has always been chaotic. From the time I got dressed in the back of a deflated, flat-tired, fish-smelling station wagon for Rocky. It's always been do it yourself, kind of like paper-clip it together.

I'll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they've gone, I'll get along. I started off living on gruel, and by God, I can always go back to it again.

My number-one theory in life is that style is proportional to your lack of resources - the less you have, the more stylish you're likely to be.

If we were poor, we didn't know it 'cause I guess you don't miss what you never had. So, you know, we made do with whatever. We used to make our own toys, and we used to play with spinning tops and marbles. A pocket full of marbles, and you were rich - you didn't worry about no money.

We were rather poor, but we always had what we needed.

You've got to deal with the tools you have in hand. I'm a firm believer in that.

Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.

I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

My father...made us shop at Goodwill. I found things to wear and got Best Dressed (in the yearbook) two years in a row. I had lemons, so I made lemonade.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.