Tenement Life Quotes

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

Tammany Hall had taught me to be kind to those in trouble, to look after the sick in the tenements, to see that the widows had food and fuel and that the men had jobs.

Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.

'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.

I was raised poor, in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the son of Cuban immigrants.