Sam Houston Quotes

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.

It's always a struggle growing up in Akron.

I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for their children.

In Ethiopia... you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had.

I had to work to eat. I couldn't even complete a basic elementary education.

My mum didn't understand that education was an important thing. She couldn't do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff. She once brought shaving soap thinking it was whipped cream.

After I won but then lost my world title I ended up with no money. Then my dad died in prison.

I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding.

A few years after my father's death, my mother sent me to the United Kingdom for 'better prospects' in 1951. Those four years were not easy.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, literally without education.

Poverty's child - he starts to grind the rice, and gazes at the moon.

Small leisure have the poor for grief.

But the peasants - how do the peasants die?

I was homeless. I lived in a car for a couple of years. That was the worst. But nothing was worse than when I was 40 and my mom passed away. My mother was the best person I ever knew. Those were the two lowest points.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

No parents. You have Uncle Jesse, forever in overalls. Then there's Bo and Duke. What do they do? I never saw them working for food or gas money. You can only kill so many possum.

Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.

I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners - even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They're not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from learning to be wise. There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,- Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

If you can imagine the area and the land in Cambodia, I mean there are hardly any roads in big parts of the country. The roads they have, in the rainy season, become just mud. So, if you’re somebody that has just one leg, or blind with no arms and you have children and you’re trying to work, and earn some money, and take care of your home, it’s hard enough to be a parent and do all of that normally.