Jeannette Walls Quotes

When I first met my husband, he had a very good job - company car, pension plan, grudging respect from his staff - the lot. I, on the other hand, was badly paid and devoid of ambition. Then I had a couple of books published and confounded all expectations by starting to earn more than he did.

I don't know how you can move out of one's socioeconomic category if you don't have education.

I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

I want to have a catalogue or a share in a company. I'm trying to take my family's name from lower-middle class to aristocracy. I have my sights set high.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House, but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly.

There is no greater ladder into the middle class than education.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

There is more opportunity for a nobody to become a somebody in Washington than in the whirl-pool of New York.

The rich follow Wealth, and the Poor the Rich.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

[William Jennings Bryan was] a poor clod, a peasant come home to the barnyard, motivated solely by the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.