I never listen to what people tell me and I can’t read. The only way I know what is right and wrong is the way I feel about things. If I feel bad, it’s wrong. If I feel good, it’s right.
BETTY SMITHYet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.
BETTY SMITH -
In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
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.
BETTY SMITH -
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.
BETTY SMITH -
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
BETTY SMITH -
Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe.
BETTY SMITH -
But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.
BETTY SMITH -
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.
BETTY SMITH -
It takes a lot of doing to die.
BETTY SMITH -
I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them from.
BETTY SMITH -
You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
BETTY SMITH -
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.
BETTY SMITH -
She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.
BETTY SMITH -
Oh time…time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.
BETTY SMITH







