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.
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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You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
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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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Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?
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I want to live for something. I don’t want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food.
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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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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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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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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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Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.
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In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm the.
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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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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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Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.
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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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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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People looking up at her–at her smooth pretty vivacious face–had no way of knowing about the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.
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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.
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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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From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.
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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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As long as one can suffer, one is living….live and suffer until life is gone.
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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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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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She had heard Papa sing so many songs about the heart; the heart that was breaking – was aching – was dancing -was heavy laden – that leaped for joy – that was heavy in sorrow – that turned over – that stood still. She really believed the heart actually did those things.
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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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Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
BETTY SMITH