Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

We were so poor as kids. I didn't even see a bathtub, running water, hot water, commode - we didn't have any of that. We started with a humble log house, milk cow, garden-raised our own food, killed a hog every year in the fall, and had the meat hanging up in the smokehouse - that was our childhood, me and ol' Si.

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn't even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

It has long been a childhood dream of mine to have a farm.

I've picked butter beans, okra, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew. I've butchered pigs, chickens. We made our own sausage and pudding.

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

My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

My dad died when I was three so my mom had to raise four kids on her own, and I think there's a part of me that pulls upon having watched my mom do that our whole lives. She had to make it work.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

I grew up in a low-income family. I was raised by a single mother.

I grew up taking care of the pigs. I love this country that, you know, somebody can do something like that.

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

I grew up during the war years in a tiny cottage with no electricity. Water for washing was pumped from a pond. My brother and I had to fetch drinking water from a tap at the end of the lane, and light was from candles, paraffin lamps, and our nightly log fire.

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.

I'm the seventh child of George and Leona Douglas, and I don't ever remember a time when my father didn't work two jobs. When my mother was going to the grocery, or going to Mass, or trying to take care of seven kids in a run-down farmhouse.

When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age.

Homesteading is gone.

I want to get a farm where I am going to live for the rest of my life. I like the idea of a secluded place.

When I first came out, I was a film student, and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did.

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

I grew up in a two-bedroom house with my grandfather, my mom and dad and four kids. I slept on the couch or on the floor, and I always wanted to have my own space.

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.

Charles Wyly was born Oct 13, 1933, in Lake Providence, La., and for a period lived with his family in a shack without electricity or plumbing.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn't afford to pay attention.