Quotes About Adversity

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud.

I didn't have parents, so I lived in people's homes... And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother.

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

My mother is a survivor who's had a lot of things happen in her life that have been very trying.

On December 17, 1984, I had surgery to remove two inches of my left lung due to pneumonia. After two hours of surgery the doctors told my mother I had AIDS.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

My mother taught me that the universe guides, teaches, and offers up gifts... even when bad things happen.

We lived in a real rough place but my mother kept me straight.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

I lost my mother when I was very young, and my father when I was in college.

Progress is the mother of all problems.

Three of them got killed. My mother was shot in the knee. But by God's grace, she's still alive.

My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages.

I wasn't raised super-poor, but my parents got divorced, and my mother didn't have much money. Even now if I have a cake, I'll eat it slowly, and I save most of the money I have.

I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.

My mother and I took over abandoned buildings to sleep in.

That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?

My mother wasn't strong like my aunt. She was just very passive.

I was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a very poor family and unfortunately my father and mother separated when I was very little.

My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.

You are far less likely to soil your pants and cry for your mother if you're prepared to defend yourself.

My mom was essentially a single mother raising three boys. If anyone could have had any reason to give up, it was her. But she didn't, and neither did we.