Jesmyn Ward Quotes

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

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

I've seen poverty up close until I was four or five.

I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.

Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.

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

I was just a regular kid in poverty, struggling.

When I was a kid in Houston, we were so poor we couldn't afford the last 2 letters, so we called ourselves po'.

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.

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

I came from a rural background, and I didn't come in contact with a lot of wealthy people.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

I don't come from money.

I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.

They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

I come from the lower middle class, originally. We didn't have anything.

I am a coolie and the son of a coolie. I was born with the poor, and I am still poor. My sympathies have always been with the struggling mass.