Bryce Courtenay Quotes

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

We did a show called The Orphan Train, during the depression, when families didn't have enough money to support their children, they'd put them on the train and hope someone would pick them up who had enough money to support their children.

My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn't stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn't have his blood.

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.

They said if I stayed in the orphanage for another month or so, I basically would not have been able to be alive.

When I was born, the economy wasn't in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.

Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13.

The stigma of being an unmarried mother was something we can't comprehend today. It was not uncommon that you'd go off somewhere to have your child, then give it up for adoption.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here's the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour.

My mother left me for seven years in an orphanage.

I ended up in Broadmeadows orphanage - I don't know how that happened - whether she gave me up for adoption or the church was responsible. Whatever happened, she was a single mum.

I was always the new kid in school, I'm the kid from a broken family, I'm the kid who had no dad showing up at the father-son stuff, I'm the kid that was using food stamps at the grocery store.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

A middle child, I was born in the depths of the Great Depression. My dad and mom were factory workers, struggling to make ends meet.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

It is easy to say that poverty is no crime .... It is a blunder though, and is punished ... A poor man is despised the whole world over.

I was raised an orphan... My mother died when I was 2 years old.

I was put in White City children's home when I was 15.

I think it's very wrong to be an unwed mother. You give your child the stigma of illegitimacy.

On both sides of my family, my grandparents grew up in total poverty and came to California during the Great Depression. The only way they were able to work their way out of that was by joining the military, which is how they both went on to be able to go to college.