And always, there was the magic of learning things.
BETTY SMITHFrom that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
More Betty Smith Quotes
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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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And that’s where the whole trouble is. We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves.
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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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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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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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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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Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?
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Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
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Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
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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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From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.
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No. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.
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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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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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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