She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.
BETTY SMITHI hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life’s too short. If you ever find a man you love, don’t waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, ‘I love you. How about getting married?
More Betty Smith Quotes
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It’s a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don’t want to understand it all. It’s beautiful because it’s always a mystery.
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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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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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She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
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Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.
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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.
BETTY SMITH -
Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world.
BETTY SMITH -
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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Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.
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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.
BETTY SMITH -
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 -
It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.
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Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
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Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
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She was surprised at how tiny it seemed now. She supposed the school was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.
BETTY SMITH -
“I wouldn’t want that to get around, Annie.” “You don’t mean that, Carl.” “Ah, we might as well call them beanies, Annie.” “Why?” “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” “Do they call them beanies in Rome?” she asked artlessly. “This is the silliest conversation.
BETTY SMITH -
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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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. . . .
BETTY SMITH -
I can never give a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I don’t believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.
BETTY SMITH -
The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.
BETTY SMITH -
“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.
BETTY SMITH -
It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.
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A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
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Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.
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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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But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it’s stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.
BETTY SMITH