Betty Smith
Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.Collection: Inspirational
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.Collection: Children
The world was hers for the reading.Collection: Inspirational
I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life--in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful--is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.Collection: Struggle
In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.Collection: Children
People always think that happiness is a faraway thing … something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up.Collection: Thinking
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 or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.Collection: Dream
I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life's too short. If you ever find a man you love, don't waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, 'I love you. How about getting married?Collection: Flirty
It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.Collection: Disappointment
Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.Collection: Inspirational
A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.Collection: Heart
As long as one can suffer, one is living....live and suffer until life is gone.Collection: Long
Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.Collection: Strength
'Dear God,' she prayed, 'let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.'Collection: Beautiful
They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.Collection: Compassion
Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life...And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.Collection: Dream
And always, there was the magic of learning things.Collection: Magic
People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.Collection: Strong
All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.Collection: Girl
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 heart and soul breaking of the world.Collection: Children
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 clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.Collection: Grieving
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 loved each other so well.Collection: Two
Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?" "They're beanies." "They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn." "But I'm not in Brooklyn." "But you're still a Brooklynite." "I wouldn't want that to get around, Annie." "You don't mean that, Carl." "Ah, we might as well call them beanies, Annie." "Why?" "When in Rome do as the Romans do." "Do they call them beanies in Rome?" she asked artlessly. "This is the silliest conversation.Collection: Mean
I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food.Collection: Giving
Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.Collection: Perspective
She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.Collection: Girl
If you love someone, you'd rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.Collection: Pain
It's a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don't want to understand it all. It's beautiful because it's always a mystery. Sometimes I say I don't believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I'm a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession, I get a heavy penance for something I couldn't help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I'll never be anything else. Of course, I didn't ask to be born Catholic, no more than I asked to be born American. But I'm glad it turned out that I'm both these things.Collection: Beautiful
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.Collection: Lying
I can never give a 'yes' or a 'no.' I don't believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.Collection: Believe
Someday you'll remember what I said and you'll thank me for it." Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down. She figured she'd have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them.Collection: Hunting
From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Girl
But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.Collection: Book
Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.Collection: Book
As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.Collection: Girl
There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it's flashing glory.Collection: Dark
Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.Collection: Two
How much do they be paying you?" he asked mellowly. "The usual salary. A little more than they think I'm worth and a little less than I think I'm worth.Collection: Thinking
She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said, "You have a bad case, a very bad case." "Of what?" "Growing up.Collection: Growing Up
No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.... That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.Collection: Sky
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.Collection: Beautiful
We'll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory...let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.Collection: Song
All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.Collection: Life
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.Collection: People
Francie looked at her legs. They were long, slender, and exquisitely molded. She wore the sheerest of flawless silk stockings, and expensively made high-heeled pumps shod her beautifully arched feet. "Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss," concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. "I'll never make it, I guess." Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.Collection: Beautiful
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky.Collection: Fall