Heather Hager

“That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian