As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.
BETTY SMITHNo. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.
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She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said, “You have a bad case, a very bad case.” “Of what?” “Growing up.
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We’ll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory…let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.
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She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
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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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She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
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Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be… safe. At least she knows she’s living.
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Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm.
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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.
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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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I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the understanding must be part of the holding.
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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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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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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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You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
BETTY SMITH