Wendy Davis Quotes

My mom has always been a huge inspiration. She was a single mom raising two kids in New York. Now that is full-on all the time.

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done.

I'm not a figurehead for anything. I was a single mom with two kids. What else was I going to do? It was either be in a band or be a waitress.

My mother was a single mom, and most of the women I know are strong.

It's so funny looking back, but my so-called overnight success actually took 15 years. I remember when I didn't have any money, and my only car was mom's Hyundai.

As an actress, I have put myself out there as an independent black woman, a single mom, a go-getter, a hustler who isn't afraid to survive.

A lot of times when people become successful, people don't really understand what they had to do or the sacrifices they made to do that, or they assume that they had money. This is coming from, like, a kid who was broke and lived with roaches and a single mom in Dorchester.

My mom was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, in 1946. She had leadership roles in the law, in government and the corporate world. She was a great role model in that she felt anything was possible.

My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.

After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.

I grew up with an Italian family in an era when a woman's path was laid out for her: You got married and had children. Simple, right? Then I got to a point around the age of 30 when I had three little children and was a single mom, and I realized life was not so simple.

We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories.

I have an incredible role model in my mom. She was a single mother raising two kids in New York.

I was once a single mother, with very few resources, so I have a special place in my heart for women in difficult situations.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

My mother was amazing. I guess, in our community, if you wanted to get by you had to work hard. So she cleaned offices. She did everything that you could imagine. We were really poor. But she would say, 'Where you are is not who you are.'

I'm raised by a single mom and didn't have pops around for the most part of my life. And she, by any means necessary, gave me the best opportunities that she knew how to give me.

For a decade, I was a stay-at-home mom. I sent my husband to his law office, sat on PTA boards and baked cookies - great cookies. All of a sudden, I had no husband, no job, few prospects, and two small children who had grown accustomed to eating.

Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.

I have to work extra hard because I am dyslexic. People said that I couldn't be an actress, but I'm proving them wrong. Acting has helped me overcome the challenge.

I didn't plan on being a single mom, but you have to deal with the cards you are dealt the best way you can.

I showed up in L.A. with $500 and a backpack and I stayed at a shelter, so nobody handed me anything. I worked for every single thing that I have.

When my mother had four girls, and she could tell her marriage was falling apart, she went back to college and got her degree in music and education.

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

When I did 'Dancing With the Stars,' I got literally thousands of emails from people saying, 'We relate to you. I've been divorced. I'm raising kids on my own.' Or, 'You've had money. You've lost money.'