Cornelia Parker Quotes

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

Parenting is something that I got early, because when you grow up without a father being there, and you see a single mother struggle to feed the kids, you do not want to put your own blood through that.

I used to sell candy and ice creams in the street, and I worked in the fields to help my parents.

I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

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.

I was born in Saratoga, Texas, a little town there in the Big Thicket about 60 miles north of Beaumont. Needless to say, we were very, very poor, but we always managed to have enough to keep our bellies full.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

Carl Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon, in 1901, grew up in a farming family, and eventually held a number of blue-collar jobs. He knew what it was to be poor and to work hard for a living.

When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.

I was born in South Carolina. On my dad's farm, I didn't have much. I'm just a poor kid who worked in a produce market.

I was a hard-workin' little boy. Oh, I worked. Pullin' cotton, shockin' grain, cuttin' wheat, loadin' wheat, choppin' cotton, cleanin' chicken houses, milkin' cows, plowin'.

When you grow up on a farm, you grow up fast.

Even though I hated doing farming and wanted to just get out of the village, I would work from 5 in the morning till 5 in the evening.

Growing up in a very poor orphanage in Ukraine, there wasn't much food.

My dad lost his father when he was nine and ran away from home to come to Mumbai to feed his mother and his three siblings.

Poverty's child - he starts to grind the rice, and gazes at the moon.

My father's father died when he was a teenager, and dad went to work to support his mother and two siblings as a carpenter and as a builder's mule, hauling carts of lumber to construction sites when it was too icy for the mules to climb the hills.

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 dad, grew up poor in a copper-mining town in Arizona. The eleventh of 15 children, he learned to be resourceful and entrepreneurial at a young age, shining shoes at local bars and starting his own pinata business at the tender age of twelve.

We barely had lights, but my mom always made sure we had food on the table and somewhere to sleep.

My dad was working in the street and my mum was working every day as a cleaner. My life was like that.

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.