“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?”

Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.

I’m from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.

you may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing

In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm the.

When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn.

We need an equal opportunity society, one in which government does not see its job as picking winners and losers. Where do you go if you want special favors?

Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.

I think mine is a very rich life.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.

And always, there was the magic of learning things.

…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.

It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life – the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.

You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.

Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.

It’s good I was born in Brooklyn. You learn how to take care of yourself.

I remember when I was 5 living on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn, the hallway of our building had a brass banister and a great sound, a great echo system. I used to sing in the hallway.

I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl.

I think of myself as a girl from Brooklyn.

I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I’m ninety, and they won’t need to paste my face with make-up.

I was raised on the streets, in hot, steamy Brooklyn, with stifled air.

The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together.

I was 12 or 13, and I had seen a demo about origami at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.