Low-Income Job Quotes

I was a janitor when I was 16, cleaning out garbage rooms in Washington, D.C., and they were foul. It gets really hot in D.C. in the summertime, and you then take on the essence of garbage. People would stand away from me on the sidewalk as I came toward them.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

My mom was a waitress, and my dad was a plumber who worked for the City of San Clemente fixing mains breaks, so not too glamorous.

My father was very clear; I had to have an ordinary upbringing. I was put to work as a lowly-paid trainee after college. I didn't like it at the time, but I can't help but feel that that was probably the best thing for me.

Me, I was waiting tables of 13 and married at 19. I graduated from public schools, and taught elementary school.

In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy - you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.

I was very poor and I was a waitress, and it's hard to be a poor waitress in New York.

My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.

I know what it's like to struggle for cash. When I went to drama school, I worked as a chambermaid to make ends meet.

They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.

Mamata Banerjee is just a casual worker, just like a commoner.

I started working when I was 13, picking up trash, bagging ice.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.

I used to sell candy and ice creams in the street, and I worked in the fields to help my parents.

My dad was a high school teacher and made no money.

We had a very normal, sort of ghetto, urban upbringing. My father was a bus driver and my mother was a seamstress and a substitute schoolteacher, off and on. So, that all adds up to no money.