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.
BETTY SMITHSome people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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I can never give a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I don’t believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.
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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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The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in.
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She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
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Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.
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Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm.
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But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
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Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?
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Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.
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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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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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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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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this.
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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
BETTY SMITH