“The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. Ma, I asked. Where di...”

“There is a sense of danger in leaving what you know, even if what you know isnt much. These mill towns with their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I l...”

“Jesus,” I prayed silently, “please fix it so that my turn to read won’t come around.” And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, “I’ll bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus?” ...”

“There is a sense of danger in leaving what you know, even if what you know isn’t much. These mill towns with their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I ...”

“No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their o...”

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoys famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it ta...”

“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”

“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”