Greta Gerwig Quotes

There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

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.

I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

I know what poverty is.

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a maid.

A middle child, I was born in the depths of the Great Depression. My dad and mom were factory workers, struggling to make ends meet.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

l had a job, and if you had a job in the depression you were rich.

Poverty demoralizes.

People who didn't know the depression just don't know what being poor means.

A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

When I was young, poverty was so common that it didn’t have a name.

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

This was life in the '30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

My parents were not professionals. They were products of the Depression.

My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.

Anyone who has lived in an area with high unemployment knows how it erodes social bonds, lowers the resilience of the unemployed and their families, and damages the prospects of the next generation.

Poverty is a lot like childbirth - you know it is going to hurt before it happens, but you'll never know how much until you experience it.

Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.