Nick Lowe Quotes

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

I was called McG since the day I was born because we were broke and there were three Joes in the house.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

We were so poor my daddy unplugged the clocks when we went to bed.

We had to take off our shoes after school to save wear on the soles.

We had no electricity, no gas. Food was probably our greatest entertainment - the most fun thing that we could do was food.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

When you're a kid, all you really care about are Slurpees and Slip N Slide and riding your bike, and that's what I did.

The money has always been wasted on me. I don't care for beautiful things, funnily enough. I am my father's daughter. The things that excite me are the smell of a wood-burning stove, uncultivated fields. My house is decaying and falling to pieces. It's not had the love it deserves over twenty years.

I grew up poor, but I didn't really know it because of amazing places like the Salvation Army where we got a lot of our Christmas presents from.

I learned how to live on five and sometimes ten dollars a week.

When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.

My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them.

Rather go to bed with out dinner than to rise in debt.

I don't think of Home Depot as romantic, but I do think the Christmas wonderland they put up during the holidays is magical. That is what Home Depot is to me, and that is the only romantic thing about it.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.

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.

I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.

When I was a kid, I lived in a poor part of Chicago, and I remember my brother and me using towels as capes. My son does it, too.

One Christmas, when Freddie and I were flatmates in Kensington, we were trying to cook Christmas dinner, but all we had was a packet of bread sauce that you make with water. We used to dream of a can of beans.

I grew up in Plaza East public housing in the Western Addition, five of us living on $900 per month. 'Recycling' meant drinking out of old mayonnaise jars.

We didn't have nine brands of cereal at home. We'd line up to fill our bowls from a giant vat of oatmeal.

Once I remember shouting, 'Mum, can I get a pound for an ice cream?' and she said, 'I haven't got a pound, Kyle.' People take so much for granted, but I will never forget that.

A Christmas gambol oft could cheer The poor man's heart through half the year.