But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
BETTY SMITHOccasionally there is a moment in a person’s life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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She 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…
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New York! I’ve always wanted to see it and now I’ve see it. It’s true what they say– it’s the most wonderful city in the world.
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The world was hers for the reading.
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You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
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Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’
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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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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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I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.
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I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
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I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life–in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful–is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.
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Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.
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She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said, “You have a bad case, a very bad case.” “Of what?” “Growing up.
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People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get.
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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
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Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.
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Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn.
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From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
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Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
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Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.
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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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There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.
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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.
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They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.
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This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this.
BETTY SMITH