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.
BETTY SMITHA 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.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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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I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.
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They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.
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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.
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Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
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There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.
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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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Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.
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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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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.
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The world was hers for the reading.
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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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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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I 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?
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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.
BETTY SMITH