Said Sayrafiezadeh Quotes

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a 'have-not,' but I knew that I wasn't.

I was always with a single mom, and we never had schedules or anything. We were just Bohemian, us against the world, which was kind of great, but it certainly didn't breed security. I've gotten hyper-sensitive to schedules and bath time and eating at the dinner table. We don't just 'Bohemian' go out at nine o'clock and go get Chinese food.

My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education.

I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.

My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

I was raised by a single mother.

I was the second of six kids. I wouldn't say we were poor; we had no money. That's different.

My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.

My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.

The difference between a child's aspiration and that family's situation, is the exact measurement of that family's frustrations.

I come from very conservative parents, and we weren't particularly wealthy, but we were comfortable.

My mom came from such humble beginnings and especially my dad as well. He didn't go to university.

I used to walk around saying that I'm just another black man without a college degree.

My heart goes out to many women that I've met across the country who barely make enough to make a living, and they want to have kids. That's very understandable, but what do you do with the kids?

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

When husbands and fathers leave, their wives and daughters tend to value themselves less as a result.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

There wasn't a kid in my neighborhood who knew his dad. My mother did it for us, and she still thinks I'm an underachiever.

I was raised by a strong single mother.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

Children are raised by single parents all the time. Those children - I'd like to claim myself as one, I was raised by a single mother who raised me incredibly well.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

The single best indicator of whether or not a child is going to be in poverty or not is whether or not they were raised by a two-parent household or a single parent household.