A Quote by Sidney Poitier

I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life. — © Sidney Poitier
I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.
I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.
Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.
Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
I had such a horrible childhood. My father was already married with three children when I was born and my mother didn't know. So we grew up poor. We had no hot water until I was 17. I went to work in a factory, and worked and saved for months until I had the money to come to England.
But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.
Because my parents, growing up, they worked hard. Everyone in my family woke up early in the morning. I used to see my mother and my father go off to work, and come back and, no matter what, they had time for the kids.
My mother carried me for 10 months. I asked her 'Mother, you had an extra month, why you didn't make me a beautiful face?' and mother told me, 'My son, I was busy making your beautiful hands and heart.'
It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!
I was raised primarily by women. I had a mother who almost killed herself to survive, I had a sister who was eight years older who was like a second mother, and my mother had two sisters. In the environment I grew up in, I heard a lot of female perspectives.
My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.
When I was seven months pregnant with my son, my mother and I took a trip to El Salvador, where she's from. Frequent visits with her to see my extended family have taught me how different life can be if you are born into poverty.
I was born an ugly duckling due to my mother's ill health. She wasn't supposed to be pregnant, there were all kinds of complications, she couldn't survive a cesarean section etc. She said, "They didn't hand me a child, they handed me a purple melon." I heard that when I had grown up and had no idea of the whole story because the family album had pictures of a covered carriage and my mother smiling so I assumed I was asleep.
Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday.
What happened to me is that as I grew up, I found that I was smart. My mother had insisted on that you see. Oh, but I loved to play ball. I loved the physical aspect. So you have one leg in one field, and one leg in the other and you're nowhere.
My mother used to read me from Bank Street schools, that book, you know, Bank Street school had these early reader books. And my mother would read to my brother and I and we had all those advantages that everyone says you need to be successful in school and I was successful in school.
For two days I had the company of a girl. She appeared next to me. It was no less of a miracle if it was my imagination which had summoned her up, because it happened at the very moment I had broken down and given up.
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