Kiki Smith Quotes

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

nothing more afflicts the mind of man than Poverty

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.

The economy is so bad that bedbugs are now infesting sleeping bags and tents, because they can't afford to stay in hotels anymore.

As I mentioned, things were particularly hard during the Depression. My paternal grandfather was frequently out of work, and the family was evicted from their home.

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.

I was having trouble making ends meet, and my beginnings weren't meeting either.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

A recession is when a neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.

Money was tight and Mum used to do two jobs to support us.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

My mother taught us to sell food in the market so we could pay for school. I would get up at 4:30 A.M. and start selling bread and cheese before going to class. School cost $65. The average salary was $125 a year, and with 10 kids, how are you going to pay for that?

I was working maybe four different jobs just to make ends meet. I was really broke. I could barely pay rent. I didn't have a car. I was riding my bike from one job to another and then to audition in between.

I was one of the poorest people in America.

I may have been in financial difficulties, but I'm not a pauper.

I was brought up on a council estate. I know what it's like to be poor.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.

What hurts me most is poverty, and that's what led me to become a rebel.

I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.