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.
BETTY SMITHYes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants.
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 -
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.
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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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Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.
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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.
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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 -
There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.
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In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
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Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!
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Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.
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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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Sometimes I say I don’t believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I’m a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession,
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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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Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’
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Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
BETTY SMITH