Dejan Lovren Quotes

My brother and I slept on the couch. I didn't get my own room until I was in college. We didn't even have a telephone until I was in college.

I'm a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school - Prior Park College in Bath - my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: 'In arrears.'

My parents divorced, my brothers and I ended up living with my mother, and we were living with the choice of heating or eating. My mum was working, but she needed financial support to make ends meet. I had to have free school dinners and free school uniforms.

My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear.

When you are already eating as cheaply and meagerly as possible, any raise in cost can quickly plunge you and your family into hunger.

To put me through school my morn had to work, so I was a latchkey kid.

One day Mum saved up for this exciting new thing - a frozen chicken. She cooked it on the Sunday and we all sat around waiting for it, but there was a terrible smell from the kitchen. She didn't realise that the giblets were in a plastic bag inside it. We just ate vegetables and she cried and cried.

My parents didn't have a lot of money, but we never knew that. They really did the best they could.

If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

I come from a family of working women, my mum went to work two weeks after I was born - my parents had no money, there was no choice.

My father was unemployed and I was the eldest of seven children. We were very poor. And when you ask how did we support ourselves, the only funding that we had was unemployment payments.

When I was a teenager, my father went bust. He could have declared himself bankrupt, but he was an honourable man and he insisted on paying back all his debts. That almost ruined the family. I was aware that my mother and father couldn't control things anymore. I guess I was afraid that we would end up on the street.

We had to make ends meet. My parents were divorced, so my father wasn't really in my life. We grew up like most kids, just wanting things.

When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn't pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing 'Careless Love' on the piano.

When I was nine years old, my family lost our home, and the six of us moved into my grandparents' converted garage.

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother, Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year, on Christmas.

My father used to be away for months at a time, and he'd never leave any money for food, so my brother and I had to go out and nick it.

At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

I grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn't have the rent money. Luckily, we were never evicted. But my father was unemployed most of the time.

When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.

My mum raised three kids on her own on sweatshop wages of about six bucks an hour so there was a lot of late rent and landlords knocking on the door.