There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.
BETTY SMITHShe was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more…
More Betty Smith Quotes
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In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
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Books became her friends, and there was one for every mood.
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She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.
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It takes a lot of doing to die.
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We’ll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory…let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.
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It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way.
BETTY SMITH -
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants.
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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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No. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.
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She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.
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And that’s where the whole trouble is. We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves.
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Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be… safe. At least she knows she’s living.
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Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar.
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Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe.
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Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?” “They’re beanies.” “They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn.” “But I’m not in Brooklyn.” “But you’re still a Brooklynite.”
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How much do they be paying you?” he asked mellowly. “The usual salary. A little more than they think I’m worth and a little less than I think I’m worth.
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Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.
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I’ll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .
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The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in.
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You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district.
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It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.
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“Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss,” concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. “I’ll never make it, I guess.” Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.
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The difference between rich and poor”, said Francie, “is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.
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The world was hers for the reading.
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Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
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People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get.
BETTY SMITH