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.
BETTY SMITHI 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.
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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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.
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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.
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The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.
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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.
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Oh time…time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.
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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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People looking up at her–at her smooth pretty vivacious face–had no way of knowing about the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.
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“Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss,” concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. “I’ll never make it, I guess.” Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.
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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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She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it
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What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.
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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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…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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It takes a lot of doing to die.
BETTY SMITH