Etta James Quotes

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

I lived the street life for a minute; I lost a lot of friends.

So when I was 13, I basically left home and never returned and lived at home again. I would come home for a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer only.

My formative years would be in South Central Los Angeles. It was a really volatile environment, but, I always say, when you're living in the hood, you don't live this life where you're crying every day, downtrodden every day.

Being homeless is like living in a post-apocalyptic world. You're on the outskirts of society.

Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.

I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away.

When I arrived in New York, I was homeless with 400 bucks in my pocket.

I once ran away from home because I was upset with my parents! I didn't get farther than a few feet into the woods, where I hid behind a tree. Sometimes you feel like you should just go out and rebel, and then you realize it's not the right thing to do. You've got to stay true to your family.

I do Skid Row every night.

I'm a homebody. I like having my parents around.

I have always looked up to my brothers. They are a huge influence on me. We constantly text and Facebook each other to give each other support. And we all hang out at home when we are in town together.

Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat.

A lot of the cats I grew up with in the South Bronx found themselves in sticky situations.

I didn't have a good childhood growing up.

Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.

There are no "points of light" for those who sleep on grates and park benches.

Men who were heads of families wandering the streets, eating from garbage cans

My home and my upbringing and just the problems in my family within my extended family were such that it truly was a mix of the good, bad, and the ugly.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.

My nickname, when I was 15 years old in the Coast Guard, they called me 'Hollywood' because I went to the movies all the time. It was such great escapism. That's why I ran away from home.

There were uncles in my life that definitely knew the street life.

I knew some people at my school who were squatters, and my younger brother was a squatter. I knew those guys: those were the people who said the Russians were the good guys and the Americans were bad. But I was the guy who went to the disco.

I'd just sit with Dee Dee on the corner off of Queens Boulevard and drink and insult people and stuff. That's when I got kicked out of my house. My mother told me it was for my own good.

My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I'd live with aunts or uncles, then I'd run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.