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.
BETTY SMITHBrooklyn 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?
More Betty Smith Quotes
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Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?” “They’re beanies.” “They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn.” “But I’m not in Brooklyn.” “But you’re still a Brooklynite.”
BETTY SMITH -
All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.
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I’ll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .
BETTY SMITH -
Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’
BETTY SMITH -
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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From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.
BETTY SMITH -
Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.
BETTY SMITH -
But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it’s stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.
BETTY SMITH -
Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar.
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From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
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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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…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.
BETTY SMITH -
Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.
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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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Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.
BETTY SMITH