Misty Copeland Quotes

I was a kid growing up in Houston, didn't have a lot - three younger brothers, a single mom. It was tough.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.

I had a really hard time growing up; we were a large family, and we didn't have much money at home.

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

I thought it was normal to recycle pants and shoes from your older cousins. That was just my way of life. At the end of the month, there was not much food in the refrigerator and you're hoping the first comes so food can come again. You never forget those things.

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.

It's tough for some families throughout the year and during the holidays.

We weren't the most fortunate family growing up.

I've lived in poverty.

I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.

I was raised really poor and so was my husband.

We grew up very poor, and I hated being poor. I was the oldest of five kids, and I never got a pair of skates until I was nine. It was very difficult to get an education back then and play junior hockey.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

I grew up in a very large, poor family.

Like David Copperfield, I was born amidst poverty and grew up in poverty. I did not own shoes. I did not bathe in water from a tap. I did no know about forks and spoons.

If I had a modelling job and then it became a poster, it meant that my kids and I could have turkey for Christmas dinner. Otherwise, we had chicken.

I didn't have life that good coming up. I wasn't born with a lot of money. We weren't dirt poor, but we weren't rich. All I knew was struggle.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

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.

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

Growing up, we really didn't have a lot of money.