Quotes About Hardship

I grew up in a family where my parents worked full-time and still found themselves and their six children trapped like so many of the working poor.

My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.

When I came up with the title 'Trapped,' I was going through a lot of personal stuff. There were a lot of things in 2018 that had me in a trapped mentality.

I didn't have any money. I used to try to take out people's trash and sweep the floor to make ends meet.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma.

I've always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around.

I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad.

If we take a hard look at what poverty is, its nature, it's not pretty - it's full of trauma. And we're able to accept trauma with certain groups, like with soldiers, for instance - we understand that they face trauma and that trauma can be connected to things like depression or acts of violence later on in life.

In my early years, I would travel 56 km. from home to the training institute and back every single day.

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

I remember I'd be sleeping in the airport at 5 o'clock in the morning, traveling three hours, and playing a game that day. We never even chartered until my third year in the NBA.

But for me, I thought you made a record, you got on a bus, went out and played your shows and made a lot of money. That was the way it was supposed to go down. But there's a lot more to it than that. There are a lot of early mornings, late nights, a lot of traveling, a lot of being away from home, being away from your family.

The playing is great. The traveling is tough. It's a hard thing.

How can I pay for dental care, doctors, the expenses of my homes or traveling. I have nothing to pay with.

Living in Europe is very hard. You're away from your family and friends for eight months and playing, traveling, training every day.

Music is one of the toughest industries, so I respect everybody who has travelled any distance, come far in this music business and achieved anything because it is so hard, and there are so many people out there these days.

I've always felt at home in America. Obviously, there's down sides to everywhere - the politics of America can be hard to take but it's not great here either. I really love the country's landscape and I've travelled it many times.

Sometimes it just doesn't translate to people. You just move on, and you feel bad because people worked so hard on it and everyone loved it... Everybody was treated so well and was going for something and trying to do the best work possible.

People don't want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they've achieved anything. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don't deserve to be getting lottery money.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

The world's treated me awfully well, and I guess it's crept into my work.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

My dad was a tree surgeon. When I was younger, he was working away five days a week for weeks on end, just trying to get as much money.

There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.