Top 40 Stephanie Land Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I felt like sitting down meant I wasn’t doing enough – like the sort of lazy welfare recipient I was assumed to be. Time lounging to read a book felt overly indulgent; almost as though such leisure was reserved for another class. I had to work constantly. I had to prove my worth for receiving government benefits.”

— Stephanie Land

2. “After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life.”

— Stephanie Land

3. “I love you, I whispered to myself. I’m here for you. Reassurance of self-love was all I had.”

— Stephanie Land

4. “Huntington’s disease.”

— Stephanie Land

5. “Being poor, living in poverty, seemed a lot like probation – the crime being a lack of means to survive.”

— Stephanie Land

6. “My only real hope was school: an education would be my token to freedom.”

— Stephanie Land

7. “Like I had been in the wrong for leaving a man who threatened me. I knew there were countless women out there in the same situation as I had been.”

— Stephanie Land

8. “None of that worked. What my mind needed to know was that someone was there to make it all better. That summer, through gritted teeth, I’d decided that person was me, not a man or a family, and it would only ever be me. I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought.”

— Stephanie Land

9. “When a person is too deep in systemic poverty, there is no upward trajectory. Life is struggle and nothing else. But for me, many of my decisions came from an assumption that things would, eventually, start to improve.”

— Stephanie Land

10. “We were expected to live off minimum wage, to work several jobs at varying hours, to afford basic needs while fighting for safe places to leave our children. Somehow nobody saw the work; they saw only the results of living a life that constantly crushed you with its impossibility. It seemed like no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, “poor” was always associated with dirty.”

— Stephanie Land

11. “Due to my self-employment, I had to report my income every few months. Earning $50 extra could make my co-pay at day care go up by the same amount. Sometimes it meant losing my childcare grant altogether. There was no incentive or opportunity to save money. The system kept me locked down, scraping the bottom of the barrel, without a plan to climb out of it.”

— Stephanie Land

12. “I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life.”

— Stephanie Land

13. “After the frightening car accident involving Mia, Land argues to her father that she needed “to be able to tell people.” Why is this? What does Land need from others?”

— Stephanie Land

14. “We work, we love, we do. And the stress of it all, the exhaustion, leaves us hollowed. Scraped out. Ghosts of our former selves.”

— Stephanie Land

15. “It seemed like certain members of society looked for opportunities to judge and scold poor people for what they felt we didn’t deserve.”

— Stephanie Land

16. “Considering the epigraph from Maya Angelou, what is involved in “making a life”? What role should “making a living” play in that?”

— Stephanie Land

17. “I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought.”

— Stephanie Land

18. “More and more, I got the feeling that people who needed government assistance were assumed to be a very uneducated bunch and were treated accordingly. How degrading, to learn that since I needed money, I must not know how to keep my utility costs low.”

— Stephanie Land

19. “I could be as reckless as I wanted with my heart, but not with hers.”

— Stephanie Land

20. “The months of poverty, instability, and insecurity created a panic response that would take years to undo.”

— Stephanie Land

21. “I’d sunk to a new low, but I wouldn’t let it sink me.”

— Stephanie Land

22. “I love you. I’m here for you. I love you. I’m here for you.”

— Stephanie Land

23. “Every single parent teetering on poverty does this. We work, we love, we do. And the stress of it all, the exhaustion, leaves us hollowed.”

— Stephanie Land

24. “Maybe the stress of keeping up a two-story house, a bad marriage, and maintaining the illusion of grandeur overwhelmed their systems in similar ways to how poverty did mine.”

— Stephanie Land

25. “Sometimes just walking behind a two-parent family on a sidewalk could trigger feelings of shame from being alone. I zeroed in on them – dressed in clothes I could never afford, diaper bag carefully packed into an expensive jogging stroller. Those moms could say things that I never could: “Honey, could you take this?” or “Here, can you hold her for a second?” The child could go from one parent’s arms to the other’s.”

— Stephanie Land

26. “When people think of food stamps they don’t envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they’d known in highschool, someone who’d been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they’d be in the same place as me.”

— Stephanie Land

27. “My hope was, if everything else in her life was chaos, at least she knew that wherever we called home, there’d be pancakes cut in the same way.”

— Stephanie Land

28. “Despite being wealthy and having the two story houses of our American dreams, the marbled sink bathrooms, the offices with bay windows looking out at the water, their lives still lacked something. I became fascinated by the things hidden in dark corners and the self help books for hope. Maybe they just had longer hallways and bigger closets to hide the things that scared them.”

— Stephanie Land

29. “After a year of abuse, threats, and screaming insults thrown at me, that question came with much relief. Most of Jamie’s rage had been invisible. It didn’t leave bruises or red marks. But this – this I could point to. I could ask someone to look at it. I could say, “He did this. He did this to us.”

— Stephanie Land

30. “All they saw were the food stamps, the large WIC paper coupons that bought us eggs, cheese, milk, and peanut butter. What they didn’t see was the balance, which hovered around $200 depending on my income, and that it was all the money I had for food. I had to stretch it to the end of each month until the balance was re-upped after the beginning of the month.”

— Stephanie Land

31. “Maybe The Alchemist had been right. Maybe if I took the first step toward my own dreams, the Universe would open and guide the way. Maybe, to find a true home, I needed to open my heart to love a home.”

— Stephanie Land

32. “But whether you called it SNAP or food stamps, the assumption that the poor stole hardworking Americans’ tax money to buy junk food was unchanged.”

— Stephanie Land

33. “Time lounging to read a book felt overly indulgent; almost as though such leisure was reserved for another class. I had to work constantly. I had to prove my worth for receiving government benefits.”

— Stephanie Land

34. “Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.”

— Stephanie Land

35. “I was overwhelmed by how much work it took to prove I was poor.”

— Stephanie Land

36. “I’d asked my child to be resilient and cope through a life of being tossed around from one caregiver to the next, and she screamed from underneath that weight. How would a stay-at-home mom, whose child had tantrums for normal things, understand my daughter’s anger?”

— Stephanie Land

37. “They don’t realize that skim milk is full of sugar?”

— Stephanie Land

38. “I knew I was one of the hard workers, like Henry had said, but I also knew I could be replaced. I had to provide for my kid. The pull to live in a better environment was too strong, even though it meant turning down work.”

— Stephanie Land

39. “Hippie types who hadn’t a clue about makeup, knew how to start a fire, and weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty in the garden. I’d missed these people. My people.”

— Stephanie Land

40. “Instead I had brief moments of familiarity on a highway, memories ingrained in me so deeply they could almost pass as a belonging.”

— Stephanie Land

41. “Living with illness or pain was part of my daily life. Part of the exhaustion. But why did my clients have these problems? It seemed like access to healthy foods, gym memberships, doc- tors, and all of that would keep a person fit and well. Maybe the stress of keeping up a two-story house, a bad marriage, and maintaining the illusion of grandeur overwhelmed their systems in similar ways to how poverty did mine.”

— Stephanie Land

42. “Most everything shut down in the Northwest when it snowed only a few inches.”

— Stephanie Land

43. “Whether on paper or in my mind, the problems I had to deal with first – the car repair, the court date, the empty cupboards – went at the top, on the left. The next pressing issue went next to it, on the right. I’d focus on one problem at a time, working left to right, top to bottom.”

— Stephanie Land

44. “You wanna know how to make God laugh?”

— Stephanie Land

45. “I wondered for a minute if Pam would fire me for not being able to work. I’d never missed this much work before, and that history at least seemed to work in my advantage. But for a few seconds, I didn’t care. I hated the job almost as much as I hated relying on it. I hated needing it. I hated having to be grateful for it.”

— Stephanie Land

46. “Tell him your plans,” she said. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

— Stephanie Land

47. “I had to keep an underlying faith that things would eventually get better. That life wouldn’t always be a struggle.”

— Stephanie Land

48. “He’d done everything right – good job, gorgeous house, married a woman he loved and traveled with – but despite all this he was still dying alone.”

— Stephanie Land

49. “Most of my friendships had faded over the last year because I’d isolated myself and hidden from the embarrassment of my daily life.”

— Stephanie Land