Edward William Bok

“ But—and here is the pivot of my strong belief in poverty as an undisguised blessing to a boy—I believe in poverty as a condition to experience, to go through, and then to get out of: not as a condition to stay in. “That’s all very well,” some will say; “easy enough to say, but how can you get out of it?” No one can definitely tell another that. No one told me. No two persons can find the same way out. Each must find his way for himself. That depends on the boy. I was determined to get out of poverty because my mother was not born in it, could not stand it, and did not belong in it. ”

“ It is all very easy for you to preach economy to us when you do not know the necessity for it: to tell us how, as for example in my own case, we must live within my husband’s income of eight hundred dollars a year, when you have never known what it is to live on less than thousands. Has it ever occurred to you, born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth, that theoretical writing is pretty cold and futile compared to the actual hand-to-mouth struggle that so many of us live, day by day and year in and year out—an experience that you know not of? ”

“ After-school hours meant for us to help a mother who daily grew more frail under the burdens that she could not carry. Not for days, but for years, we two boys got up in the gray cold winter dawn when the bed feels so snug and warm to growing boys, and we sifted the cold ashes of the day-before fire for a stray lump or two of unburned coal, and with what we had or could find we made the fire and warmed up the room. ”