Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound but you couldn’t fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
BETTY SMITHBad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it’s flashing glory.
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Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.
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Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard.
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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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Francie looked at her legs. They were long, slender, and exquisitely molded. She wore the sheerest of flawless silk stockings, and expensively made high-heeled pumps shod her beautifully arched feet.
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I can never give a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I don’t believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.
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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
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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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And always, there was the magic of learning things.
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The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.
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Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret
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Of course, I didn’t ask to be born Catholic, no more than I asked to be born American. But I’m glad it turned out that I’m both these things.
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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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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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I never listen to what people tell me and I can’t read. The only way I know what is right and wrong is the way I feel about things. If I feel bad, it’s wrong. If I feel good, it’s right.
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It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.
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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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…the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only – the something different from anyone else in the two families.
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Sometimes I say I don’t believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I’m a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession,
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If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really is.
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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.
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In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
BETTY SMITH