Carolina Maria de Jesus Quotes

I learned at a very early age that life is a battle. My family was poor, my neighborhood was poor. The only way that I could get away from the awfulness of life, at that time, was at the movies. There I decided that my big aim was to make money. And it was there that I became a very determined woman.

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

As I wrote about my childhood, I realized that there was no big tragedy. Being multiethnic is not a tragedy. I didn't have any big life-threatening illnesses, no tumors, no kidney malfunctions... I came from a very poor family. I was chubby as a kid.

There's no success story. Everybody's got a ghetto story. You always want to make it bigger than what it is.

I'm a creative person who had a lot of dark time in my life. I can still get to it: I can still go to a relationship or a time when things weren't great. But it's getting further and further from me.

Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.

I came from nothing really to something; I came from the gutter to making the gutters.

The simple facts of Chadian life - what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals - stunned me. And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies.

Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.

I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person.

Looking back, my life seems like one long obstacle race, with me as the chief obstacle.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax.

This record for the first time - feels like a record that really represents my whole entire life and instead of just a period of my life. And it is really kind of eye opening and it makes me feel really good to hear this record and hear all the years.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

I wasn't born with a golden spoon in my mouth. It was a really tough life.

When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn't have anything growing up.

I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight.

My first book was called, 'Mountain, Get Out of My Way,' where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people's lives and trying to be motivational.

I decided, if I'm going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I'm going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

Every step of the way, life was hard. I was supposed to be a statistic.

I just grew up a poor black kid in Alabama with a single mom and two brothers.