AJ Lee Quotes

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, 'Don't get comfortable, because we may not be here long.'

After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times.

I worked out; I moved 16 times from the age of 19, just hopping about from different flats, because I couldn't always afford to stay.

I moved around 13 different times before I was in fifth grade, not having money, not having a lot of friends.

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

I actually didn't think there was that many people out there who knew what it's like to not really have a home or have that home in one place.

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.

When I was 5, 6 - so you know, memories aren't that great - I remember coming home and I remember seeing all of our belongings on the street and a Salvation Army truck picking them up. We got taken to a shelter. And then we moved around a lot, finding places to stay.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

I lived on a farm with cows, and I lived in the city with rats. My family stayed in Colorado for a while, then went from Los Angeles to Arizona. People would ask me where I'm from, and I would have to say, 'I don't have a clear answer for you.'

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

Every day, it's a different country, different time zone. If you asked me where home was, I've never felt like I've had that. My idea of comfort is to leave a place. Two weeks is sort of my max.

Eviction is a cause, not just a condition of poverty.

Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.

I lived in several hotels, yeah. You have to try to make it home.

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

We got evicted from our house in Guildford. We were chucked out and had nowhere to go. We ended up in social housing. And it was very hard for my mum. My brothers were five and three.

I know what it's like to be a teenager in Orange County. I know what it's like to be a kid in L.A. I know what it's like to not have any money and have your lights turned off. I know what it's like to live in a house with five rooms.

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times.

When I was growing up, I heard horror stories about producers losing their houses overnight. No matter who the family is, hearing of them getting evicted is very sad.

I've very aware of my rootlessness.

Living with the notion that you might never have a permanent spot in the world is really quite a powerful metaphor.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family... Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house.