Betty Smith Quotes
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. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
Quotes to Explore
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Sometimes you read pilots and, understandably, they're doing such a frantic tap dance for approval. I get why - it's such an incredibly competitive market.
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If you want to cultivate a habit, do it without any reservation, till it is firmly established. Until it is so confirmed, until it becomes a part of your character, let there be no exception, no relaxation of effort.
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Every little action creates an effect: We are all interconnected.
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Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.
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I think back to the 1990s, when I joined the Army, and all those peacetime years that we had, thinking, 'Will we ever go into combat?'
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'Firewall' seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides 'military' and 'government?'
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God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
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Throughout history, clothes represented who you were; they are a great vehicle for explaining who you are. During the Ching dynasty, for example, what you wore and how it was made reflected your status in society. People could literally read your clothes like a book, just by its color and how it was embroidered.
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I was in Nashville quite a bit when I shot 'Nashville,' and I was in Los Angeles when I shot in 'Supergirl'.
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What you wear onstage is a reflection of your artistry.
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Certainly I was relatively a refined person. No way a tramp.
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If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.
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The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.
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It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.
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We never take people seriously when they are alive, but once they are gone, we always think that we should have treated them better.
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If you are unable to understand the cause of a problem it is impossible to solve it.
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It should not be the government running the economy.
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Often the last thing I want to do is stand up in front of 50 cameras on the red carpet. I'd rather have a cup of hot milk and an early night.
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When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.
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I often look at places and kind of mentally convert them to fantasy versions of themselves.
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We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.
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I need one psychological expert to help me concentrate.
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When you watch people when they're relaxed, that's when you learn the most about them. That's when you really learn about who they really are.
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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. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
