Aja Brown Quotes

I didn't grow up wealthy. We couldn't even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money.

My mom didn't have a lot of money.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

My parents didn't have any money.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I grew up in a very large, poor family.

Growing up low income and poor, I didn't have the best relationship with money.

I have way more experience being poor than I do having money.

We didn't grow up rich people.

I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

Growing up, I was raised by a single mother.

I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

We were on welfare when we were kids. Thanks for reminding me of that.