Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
BETTY SMITHIt was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’
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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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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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And that’s where the whole trouble is. We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves.
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It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.
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Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.
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How much do they be paying you?” he asked mellowly. “The usual salary. A little more than they think I’m worth and a little less than I think I’m worth.
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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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“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.
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“Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss,” concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. “I’ll never make it, I guess.” Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.
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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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Books became her friends, and there was one for every mood.
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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
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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