Charles Barkley Quotes

I was a poor kid, and my mom was a single mother of three.

I'm raised by a single mom and didn't have pops around for the most part of my life. And she, by any means necessary, gave me the best opportunities that she knew how to give me.

My mother raised me herself, along with my six younger siblings, in Cleveland, and life wasn't easy even in the best of times. At age 42, she died, and it fell on me, then aged 22 and working minimum wage, to take care of all of us. At the time, I was newly married with a baby son. And I was deeply afraid for our future.

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

My mom got 11 kids. We struggled.

My mom is a beautiful, amazing woman. We didn't have a ton of money growing up, and even, at one point, we were living on food stamps. But my mom still managed to make sure we ate healthy and were always fed nutritious meals!

We didn't have a whole lot of cash growing up. My mom was a single parent for a while before my stepdad came into the picture.

Growing up in Orangeburg, I didn't know that I lived in the 'corridor of shame.' I was the son of a single mom who learned to read from comic books. My grandparents helped raise me.

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.

We were not rich by any means. My dad was a plasterer and worked long hours - I hardly ever saw him when I was growing up. He had always gone to work before I woke up, and usually, I would be in bed before he came home.

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

I came from poverty and was part of those circumstances.

We didn't have much money. My whole extended family used to help us, and buy us books and food. It was hard, and there were things I didn't want to talk about. But at the end I was a happy girl.

A lot of times when people become successful, people don't really understand what they had to do or the sacrifices they made to do that, or they assume that they had money. This is coming from, like, a kid who was broke and lived with roaches and a single mom in Dorchester.

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.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

My father died when I was nine and a half. We were on relief for two years. They call it welfare now, but it was relief then... I never forgot the generosity of New York.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

I'd go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

I grew up in a very open-minded family. My father died when I was very little, so my mother was really, really incredibly busy trying to provide for us.

My dad died in 1980, and I found out afterwards from mum that my piano lessons, which cost £2 a week, took up nearly a third of his income.

I started doing radio commercials for Kmart when I was 4. They had to splice all my consonants together because I couldn't talk very well. But these jobs helped my mother and me put food on the table. It took the two of us working.

You have kids growing up in some of the worst circumstances financially, living in some of the worst ghettos, and they succeed. They succeed because an adult figure, typically a mother, maybe a grandmother, nourishes the kid, supports the kid, protects the kid, encourages the kid to succeed. It's as if the environment never happened.

Sammy Sosa grew up without a father in the back of a converted public hospital in San Pedro de Macoris, a dusty seaside town in the Dominican Republic. His father, Juan Montero, died when Sosa was 5.

As you know, I'm a black girl out of the projects of New York City, raised in a single parent home because my parents divorced very very young... welfare and homeless at four and then again at 16 and just not having the things or the necessary tools that society would say I needed to have in order to be any kind of success in life.