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 SMITHEvery day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret
More Betty Smith Quotes
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Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
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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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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.
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The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.
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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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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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Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.
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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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She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.
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And always, there was the magic of learning things.
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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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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.”
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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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If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
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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.
BETTY SMITH