David Lammy Quotes

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.

I was a kid growing up in Houston, didn't have a lot - three younger brothers, a single mom. It was tough.

I experienced the sharp end of a tough time, living with a single parent, my mum, and she was really struggling to get a job. These are the things that form your views in life. They are established when you are growing up and being raised. That stuff doesn't really go away; that stays with you.

I was a poor kid, and my mom was a single mother of three.

Mom raised me all by herself, and although we went through our share of lean years, she always worked hard to make our home warm and welcoming.

I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

As you know, I'm a black girl out of the projects of New York City, raised in a single parent home because my parents divorced very very young... welfare and homeless at four and then again at 16 and just not having the things or the necessary tools that society would say I needed to have in order to be any kind of success in life.

I didn't have any extra money. But I can't say that I had a hard early career.

My mom was a hairstylist, but she quit doing that to raise the kids - there were four of us. There was no money.

You have to pay the bills when you're a single mum.

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.

My family were really poor.

Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn't help.

I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.

My mother really struggled when we were young. She was on food stamps and welfare. Looking back, I know we didn't have a lot, but I never felt I was at a loss for anything.

We didn't have a whole lot of cash growing up. My mom was a single parent for a while before my stepdad came into the picture.

Because I grew up in a single parent home with my mom, growing up, things weren't always the best.

My family, like many families here in South Carolina, have faced difficult financial situations.

I used to listen to 'Ready to Die' around the time I dropped out of college. I was scrambling for work and money.

I was once a single mother, with very few resources, so I have a special place in my heart for women in difficult situations.