Top 200 Betty Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.”

— Betty Smith

102. “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 all the umbrellas. Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things.”

— Betty Smith

103. “Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.”

— Betty Smith

104. “You betcha they’d live, thought Francie grimly. It takes a lot of doing to die.”

— Betty Smith

105. “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.” “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.”

— Betty Smith

106. “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.”

— Betty Smith

107. “Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, 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 comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

— Betty Smith

108. “I wait for death with the courage I gained from living.”

— Betty Smith

109. “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.”

— Betty Smith

110. “Seems like I’m the most dissatisfied person in the whole world. Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!”

— Betty Smith

111. “That is what is called learning the truth. 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. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have a practice in disappoinment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”

— Betty Smith

112. “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.”

— Betty Smith

113. “They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.”

— Betty Smith

114. “And Francie whispered yeah in agreement. She was proud of that smell. It let her know that nearby was a waterway, which, dirty though it was, joined a river that flowed out to the sea. To her, the stupendous stench suggested far-sailing ships and adventure and she was pleased with the smell.”

— Betty Smith

115. “Last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself.”

— Betty Smith

116. “Ghosts are not always those who pass through closed doors,” said Mary Rommely. “Katie has told how her husband used to talk to this saloon man. In all those years of the talking, Yohnny gave away pieces of himself to this man. When Katie called on her man for help, the pieces of him came together in this man, and it was Yohnny within the saloon man’s soul that heard and came to her help.”

— Betty Smith

117. “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.”

— Betty Smith

118. “Pipe dreams, he thought to himself, even while he was telling her about his dream winnings. But oh, how wonderful, he thought, if everything you talked about could come true!”

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

120. “A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.”

— Betty Smith

121. “She was surprised at how tiny the school seemed now. She supposed it was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.”

— Betty Smith

122. “Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.”

— Betty Smith

123. “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-generation Americans.”

— Betty Smith

124. “School days went along. Some were made up of meanness, brutality, and heartbreak; others were bright and beautiful because of Miss Bernstone and Mr. Morton. And always, there was the magic of learning new things.”

— Betty Smith

125. “In the winter, when the first snow was too delicate to last on the sidewalks, it clung to the rough surface of the brick and was like fairy lace.”

— Betty Smith

126. “They were in Julius Caesar now and the stage direction “Alarum” confused Katie. She thought it had something to do with fire engines and whenever she came to that word, she shouted out “clang-clang.” The children thought it was wonderful.”

— Betty Smith

127. “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 she arrived one minute after, she worried because that made her the logical scapegoat of the boss if he happened to be in a bad mood that day.”

— Betty Smith

128. “From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence, and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography.”

— Betty Smith

129. “It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind – as they are in the mind of every lonely child – that she didn’t know which was which. But Teacher made these two things clear to her. From that time on, she wrote little stories about things she saw and felt and did. In time, she got so that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts.”

— Betty Smith

130. “Oh, to be a Chinaman, wished Francie, and have such a pretty toy to count on; oh, to eat all the lichee nuts she wanted and to know the mystery of the iron that was ever hot and yet never stood on a stove. Oh, to paint those symbols with a slight brush and a quick turn of the wrist and to make a clear black mark as fragile as a piece of a butterfly wing! That was the mystery of the Orient in Brooklyn.”

— Betty Smith

131. “I will not speak falsely and say to you: ‘Do not grieve for me when I go.’ I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my children grieve for me. But let your grief be gentle and brief. And let resignation creep into it. Know that I shall be happy. I shall see face to face the great saints I have loved all my life.”

— Betty Smith

132. “Neeley came home and he and Francie were sent out for the weekend meat. This was an important ritual and called for detail instructions by mama.”

— Betty Smith

133. “Arriving at the store, she walked up and down the aisles handling any object her fancy favored. What a wonderful feeling to pick something up, hold it for a moment, feel its contour, run her hand over its surface and then replace it carefully. Her nickel gave her this privilege. If a floor-walker asked whether she intended buying anything, she could say, yes, buy it and show him a thing or two. Money was a wonderful thing, she decided.”

— Betty Smith

134. “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.”

— Betty Smith

135. “There were times though, especially towards the end of a long cold dark winter, when, no matter how hungry Francie was, nothing tasted good. That was big pickle time.”

— Betty Smith

136. “Neeley, if you had to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to die now – while you believed that everything was perfect, the way this night is perfect?”

— Betty Smith

137. “Run, run, you fool, before the waves of hurt start breaking.”

— Betty Smith

138. “Eyes changed after they looked at new things.”

— Betty Smith

139. “They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering Wes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.”

— Betty Smith

140. “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.”

— Betty Smith

141. “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, then, in the world,” decided Francie unhappily. “If there is anything new or different, some part of it must be in Brooklyn and I must be used to it and wouldn’t be able to notice it if I came across it.”

— Betty Smith

142. “Debe haber aguas turbias y oscuras para que el sol tenga algo que enmarque su deslumbrante gloria.”

— Betty Smith

143. “Funny! A person lives one way and he thinks all people live that way because there is no other way. Then he goes away somewhere and sees there are other ways to live.”

— Betty Smith

144. “Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?”

— Betty Smith

145. “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library paste and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.”

— Betty Smith

146. “I can never give a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I don’t believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.”

— Betty Smith

147. “Francie loved the smell of coffee and the way it was hot. As she ate her bread and meat, she kept one hand curved about the cup enjoying its warmth. From time to time, she’d smell the bitter sweetness of it. That was better than drinking it. At the end of the meal, it went downt the sink.”

— Betty Smith

148. “Good-bye, Francie.”

— Betty Smith

149. “When you get home, burn these in the stove. Apply the match to them yourself. And as the flames rise, keep saying: ‘I am burning ugliness. I am burning ugliness.”

— Betty Smith

150. “Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.”

— Betty Smith