Allison Anders Quotes

The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

We don't make enough in our job to live the way that we would want to and to have the support that we would need. Most of our income doesn't even come from our salary from our employer and we have to find income from other places.

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

My parents had always preached the virtues of hard work. But hard work is one thing; economic struggle is another.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I need the money. People don't understand how little money you make in a band.

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

My father was unemployed and I was the eldest of seven children. We were very poor. And when you ask how did we support ourselves, the only funding that we had was unemployment payments.

Poverty is the only load which is the heavier the more loved ones there are to assist in bearing it.

I grew up in poverty. For 25 years I was fed on aid.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Now if you are condemned to life on welfare, I'm not so sure that being in a bigger welfare village is that much better than being in a smaller welfare village.

I don't make any money.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, where we put people in bondage so they can't be all that they're capable of being.

When I joined 'Essence,' I was a young, single mother. I was 24. I hadn't gone to college. I wasn't making any money at 'Essence' - what was it, $500 a month - and I was struggling. So I was always looking down the road, always hoping for a better, you know, tomorrow.

There are schoolteachers around the country that work second jobs after their teaching duties are done: one woman in North Dakota I spoke to was heading off to clean houses after the final bell in order to pay her rent.

I grew up in a family struggling for work.

Too often, while well-intentioned, our poverty programs fail the poor. They fail them by keeping them in cycles of dependency.

I've pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.

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.

When we came to this country, unfortunately, my father lost his job, and we were this close to destitution. We were put on food stamps. We were put in public housing.

We had bills to pay. My dad wasn't working, and it was tough for my mom. People were always raising the rent, so I had to work, too. Everybody in the house worked to pay the rent.

I was working at Lowes and Target, then FedEx, and still did not have enough money to pay rent on my own.