“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.”

From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.

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?

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

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.

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.

Occasionally there is a moment in a person’s life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment.

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,

Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.

But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.

What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read.

All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.

Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.

I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I’ll never be anything else.

It takes a lot of doing to die.

It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more.

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.