Frank McCourt Quotes

I thought it was normal to recycle pants and shoes from your older cousins. That was just my way of life. At the end of the month, there was not much food in the refrigerator and you're hoping the first comes so food can come again. You never forget those things.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.

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

We had very few things. I had a couple pairs of jeans, a couple shirts. And same with my mom and sister. I think my sister had, like, two toys. We were living off of instant noodles.

I did just about anything to pay the rent for a while.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

Everything that poverty touches becomes frightful.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

I can remember standing in a W.P.A. line with a gunny sack, and I remember having to buy chocolate milk instead of white because it was one cent cheaper.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

I see my friends, my family, my cousins work all day long for very little money, and if I have this problem of not being able to wall on the streets, it's not a big deal.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

As an actress for most of my life, I am profoundly familiar with poverty.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.