Quotes from Betty Smith

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

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.

People always think that happiness is a faraway thing … something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up.

I'll not punish you for having an imagination.

And always, there was the magic of learning things.

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.

'Dear God,' she prayed, 'let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.'

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.

You won't die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life.

All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.

As long as one can suffer, one is living....live and suffer until life is gone.

I can never give a 'yes' or a 'no.' I don't believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.

Well' Francie decided, 'I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but'.

Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.

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.

Oh time...time, pass so that I forget! Oh time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.

If you love someone, you'd rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.

Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.

I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, youll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.

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.

The world was hers for the reading.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.