I never listen to what people tell me and I can't read. The only way I know what is right and wrong is the way I feel about things. If I feel bad, it's wrong. If I feel good, it's right.
I need someone, thought Francie desperately. I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the under...
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...
I don't need to drink to get drunk. I can get drunk on things like the tulip---and this night.
Going home in the trolley, Francie held the shoebox in her lap because Mama had no lap now. Francie thought deep thoughts during her ride. 'If what Granma Mary Rommely said is true, then it must be th...
Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.
For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word mouse had instantaneous mean...
Eyes changed after they looked at new things.
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...
. . you’ll always come out all right – no matter what. You’re like me that way.’ And that’s where the whole trouble is, thought Francie. We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’...
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...
When the strong healthy boy, howling at the indignity of the birth process, was put to her breast, she felt a wild tenderness for him, The other baby, Francis, in the crib next her bed, began to whimp...
There were two dozen tightly rolled, never-used silk umbrellas in that closet; prizes she had won. Flossie collected them for display the way an athlete collects cups. Francie felt happy looking at al...
There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard, unfamiliar things, there is here - hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his fath...
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 baby Francie crowed with delight as her grandmother held up the cruet and the sun shone through it and made a small fat rainbow on the opposite wall. Mary smiled with the child and made the rainbo...
Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.
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...
Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her m...
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter qu...