Flossie was always running after men and they were always running away from her. Francie’s Aunt Sissy ran after men, too. But somehow they ran to meet her halfway. The difference was that Flossie Gadd...
Education! That was it! It was education that made the difference! Education would pull them out of the grime and dirt.
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...
And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's myst...
You betcha they’d live, thought Francie grimly. It takes a lot of doing to die.
So she learned ways of conserving bits of seconds. Long before the train ground to a stop at her station, she pushed her way to the door to be one of the first expelled when it slid open. Out of the t...
She was the books she read in the library.
She was surprised at how tiny the school seemed now. She supposed it was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.
She liked numbers and sums. She devised a game in which each number was a family member and the answer made a family grouping with a story to it. Naught was a babe in arms. He gave no trouble. Wheneve...
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber as a word was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah ha...
Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the...
Oh, and you must not forget the Kris Kringle. The child must believe in him until she reaches the age of six.Mother, I know there are no ghosts or fairies. I would be teaching the child foolish lies.M...
Oh time...time, pass so that I forget!Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.
No, Katie never fumbled. When she used her beautifully shaped but worn-looking hands, she used them with surety, whether it was to put a broken flower into a tumbler of water with one true gesture, or...
Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other...
Maybe, thought Francie, she doesn’t love me as much as she loves Neeley. But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved.
Mary was convinced that because of some sin she had unwittingly committed in her life, she was mated with the devil himself. She really believed this because her husband told her so. I am the devil hi...
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who love...
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...
In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it happened. Tell the truth and write the story.