Jennifer Connelly Quotes

I understand human needs. I grew up where far too many people lived day to day without elemental needs like food and shelter.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

I have a roof over my head. I had a breakfast, and a lot of people in the world can't say that. I'm not going to complain about being interviewed.

I've lived places these guys can't defecate in.

Hunger and homelessness aren't things we always want to talk about.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

But one of the best things away from playing was a visit to a Mumbai slum. You see people in their conditions, getting stuck into their way of life and not moaning, and realise how lucky you are to be doing what you are doing. It put things into perspective.

Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.

I sleep equally well in a soft bed or on the grass beside the road. If I am given food and shelter, fine. If not, I'm just as happy. Many times I am given shelter by total strangers. When hospitality is not available there are always bus depots, railroad stations and all night truck stops.... When no shelter is available to me, I sleep in the fields or by the side of the road with God to guard me.

A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.

It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

It is useless to talk virtue to a starving girl.

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.

The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

You don't worry about happiness and fulfilment when you're starving.

I just feel fortune just to have been lucky enough, and worked hard enough, and blessed.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

People who are homeless, they're not all addicts. A lot of times, they're just people who, through something like losing their job or losing someone in their life, ended up on the streets. So much of our time is spent in cars that sometimes you need to look out of those windows. And you see that a dollar, 50 cents, whatever you have, may not mean much to you, but it means everything to people who are hungry and who are in need.

I can't look in the mirror and see people dying on the street that should have the same opportunities that I've had. And say 'You know what? I can live with myself.' Because I can't if I just watch.

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

I feel that I'm very blessed. But with great blessings come great responsibility.