Charles Dickens Quotes

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

I was definitely an at-risk kid growing up.

I had this almost Dickensian look. I was quite fragile.

Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

Sometimes poverty is the greatest gift you can ever be given. Sometimes loss is the key that leads you to gain.

I was 21 and homeless - such a broken, lost woman.

I'm an incredibly lucky girl. For someone who has made some very foolish mistakes and had some tough lessons to learn very quickly, I am still incredibly lucky.

Jesus Christ - He means the world to me. So many different situations I've been through, through my childhood and now my adulthood; I lost my brother at a young age. He got hit by a car right in front of me. I had to be strong for my mom.

I didn't really have an interest in politics when I first entered the workforce. What I wanted to do was help people who grew up like me. When I was a kid growing up in Tucson, my father lost his job and we lost everything - including our home. We lived in an abandoned gas station for two years until we were able to get back on our feet.

Eviction reveals people's vulnerability and desperation as well as their ingenuity and guts.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

When you go through hell, your own personal hell, and you have lost - loss of fame, loss of money, loss of career, loss of family, loss of love, loss of your own identity that I experienced in my own life - and you've been able to face the demons that have haunted you... I appreciate everything that I have.

Growing up in a trailer, you think everything you get is good. I always thought it was a gift from God, because some people are out here struggling and on the street. We had warmth. We had clothes. We had a roof over our head.

If a kid is born into a tough situation with no means of dealing with it, you end up with kids who are mentally ill and have no way of reaching out.

Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

The one thing that made me somewhat of an animal is I didn't have anything growing up.

I was in the streets at eight, nine years old.

I lived in the streets for three years when I was a kid, and every day, I didn't know where my next meal would come from.

I fought from the time I was eight years old, sometimes three, four fights a night. We did it to eat, and we did it because we were just tough kids.

It's so weird, like, it's not like Gamergate is the only bad thing to happen to me. I've been homeless before, I've had to come through other stuff. A profoundly abusive childhood, but at least that stuff feels like I got to move on from it, that stuff is in the past.

Thanks to my mother, I graduated. But then we lost everything, we were homeless.

You can be humbled as a goalkeeper. You have to accept that.