Betty Smith Quotes
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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. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. 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.
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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.
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You won't die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.
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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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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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It takes a lot of doing to die.
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New York! I've always wanted to see it and now I've see it. It's true what they say-- it's the most wonderful city in the world.
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Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
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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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There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.
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As long as one can suffer, one is living....live and suffer until life is gone.
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Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.
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All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.
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A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
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‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’
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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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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. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
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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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They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.
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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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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. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.
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People always think that happiness is a faraway thing … something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up.
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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 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. She liked the cmbined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.