George Orwell
:: Down and Out in Paris and London
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically differet. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it ismerely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
'... It don't follow that because a man's on the road he can't think of anything but tea-and-two-slives.'