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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.

Betty Smith

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

Children Grief Winter
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.
BETTY SMITH

Beautiful Country Summer
The world was hers for the reading.
BETTY SMITH

Book Inspirational Reading
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.
BETTY SMITH

Beautiful Thinking Tree
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.
BETTY SMITH

Fighting Pain Thinking
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 SMITH

Salary Thinking Usual
You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
BETTY SMITH

Born Dies Rotten
The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.
BETTY SMITH

Children Cities Important
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.
BETTY SMITH

Brother Father Flower
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.
BETTY SMITH

Fake Horse People Wonderful
Of course, I didn’t ask to be born Catholic, no more than I asked to be born American. But I’m glad it turned out that I’m both these things.
BETTY SMITH

Ask Catholic God Things Turned
Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard.
BETTY SMITH

Children Mother Strong
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.
BETTY SMITH

Air Neighborhood Nice Sunday Took
Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
BETTY SMITH

Cost Forgiveness Inspirational
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.
BETTY SMITH

Different Fingerprints God One Puts Things
It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.
BETTY SMITH

Other School Unattainable Worlds

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 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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