Betty Smith Quotes

Last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself

Laurie's going to have a mighty easy life all right.Annie Laurie McShane! She'll never have the hard times we had, will she?No. And she'll never have the fun we had, either.Gosh! We did have fun, didn...

Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect.

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.

Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things.

She had heard Papa sing so many songs about the heart; the heart that was breaking - was aching - was dancing -was heavy laden - that leaped for joy - that was heavy in sorrow - that turned over - tha...

She knew from listening to her grandmother that old age was made up of such remembrances of youth.But she didn’t want to recall things. She wanted to live things—or as a compromise, re-live rather tha...

She loved books. She loved them with her senses and her intellect. They way they looked and smelled; the way they felt in her hands; the way the pages seemed to murmur as she turned them. Everything t...

She was a blameless sinless woman, yet she understood who how it was with people who sinned. Inflexibly rigid in her own moral conduct, she condoned weaknesses in others. She revered God and loved Jes...

She was the books she read in the library.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, h...

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...

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.

Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-...

Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.

The difference between rich and poor, said Francie, is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life. They are his contact with the supplies that keep life going; they hold the beauty that his soul longs for; they hold the unattaina...

There are two truths, said Katie finally. As a mother, I say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to sleep with a stranger--a man she had known less than forty-eight hours. Horrible things m...

There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.

There was a special Nolan idea about the coffee. It was their one great luxury. Mama made a big potful each morning and reheated it for dinner and supper and it got stronger as the day wore on. It was...