Betty Smith Quotes

It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn't want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that.

She did not hate Miss Garnder anymore. She didn't like her, but she felt sorry for her. Miss Garnder had nothing in all the world excepting a sureness about how right she was.

All she’d notice was that some things were strange because they reminded her of Brooklyn and that other things were strange because they were so different from Brooklyn. I guess there is nothing new,...

Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and...

Anybody, said Johnny, carried away by his personal dream of Democracy, can ride in one of the hansom cabs, provided, he qualified, they get the money. So you can see what a free country we got here.Wh...

You must learn to take a joke, Francie, otherwise life will be pretty hard on you.

She looked quickly at the little golden-brown pottery jug which stood at the end of the librarian's desk. It was a season indicator. In the fall it held a few sprigs of bittersweet and at Christmas ti...

You know, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something com...

Why can't they, she thought bitterly, just give the doll away without saying I am poor and she is rich? Why couldn't they just give it away without all the talking about it?

But she didn't want to recall things. She wanted to live things — or as a compromise, relive rather than reminisce.

The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-...

The pipe came from Sissy’s factory. The factory made a few rubber toys as a blind. It made its big profits from other rubber articles which were bought in whispers.

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 wire...

The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the su...

Now my wandering days are over. It will be bliss to settle down. Bliss. There's a word, now. Bliss to love and to be loved.

We're too much alike to understand each other because we don't even understand ourselves.

Katie! Don't nag! All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the life it's in him to live.

Engaged, he said bitterly. Everybody's engaged. Everybody in a small town is engaged or married or in trouble. There's nothing else to do in a small town. You go to school. You start walking home with...

She adapted herself to the split-second rhythm of the New Yorker going to and from work. Getting to the office was a nervous ordeal. If she arrived one minute before nine, she was a free person. If sh...

I don’t know, Miss Lizzie said. Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe. She waited until...