But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.
BETTY SMITHSerene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.
BETTY SMITH -
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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But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
BETTY SMITH -
“I wouldn’t want that to get around, Annie.” “You don’t mean that, Carl.” “Ah, we might as well call them beanies, Annie.” “Why?” “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” “Do they call them beanies in Rome?” she asked artlessly. “This is the silliest conversation.
BETTY SMITH -
Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.
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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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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.
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Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.
BETTY SMITH -
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 something every minute of every hour of my life…And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
BETTY SMITH -
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.
BETTY SMITH -
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants.
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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.
BETTY SMITH -
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.
BETTY SMITH