“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 SMITHI came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life–in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful–is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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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“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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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.
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Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.
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Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.
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Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!
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Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
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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
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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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You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
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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.
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Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.
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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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People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get.
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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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No. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.
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Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret
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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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Serene 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.
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Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
BETTY SMITH