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.
BETTY SMITHIntolerance 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.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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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I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them from.
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Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?
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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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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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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.
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Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!
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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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Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
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Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
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I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.
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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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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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Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.
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It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life – the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
BETTY SMITH