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 SMITHSuffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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.
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…the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only – the something different from anyone else in the two families.
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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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Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.
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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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It 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.
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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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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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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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Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
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Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
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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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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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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 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.
BETTY SMITH