What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.

That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be
generous.

O, we poor orphans of nothing- alone on that lonely shore-
Born of the brainless Nature who knew not that which she bore!

I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.

My birth was my first misfortune.

He knew what poverty means. The chilling of brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering about one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the world’s base indifference. Poverty! Poverty!

The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how she had come to feel. And it was bitter because it was a self imposed poverty.

From my novel Seaside Daisies:

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted
is the most terrible poverty

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people who could help you make more of yourself.

That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.

INFANT SORROW My mother groaned, my father wept: Into the dangerous world I leapt, Helpless, naked, piping loud, Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my father's hands, Striving against my swaddling-bands, Bound and weary, I thought best To sulk upon my mother's breast.

You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.