Top 200 Betty Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Betty Smith

152. “Tell the truth and write the story.”

— Betty Smith

153. “Growing up spoiled a lot of things.”

— Betty Smith

154. “Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.”

— Betty Smith

155. “Till We Meet Again.”

— Betty Smith

156. “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.”

— Betty Smith

157. “Vaccination is a very good thing. It makes you tell your left hand from your right.”

— Betty Smith

158. “Growing up ruins everything.”

— Betty Smith

159. “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.”

— Betty Smith

160. “A wave of hurt broke over Francie and left her weak when it was passed. Another wave came, broke and receded. She found her way down to the cellar of her house and sat in the darkest corner on a heap of burlap sacks and waited while the hurt waves swept over her. As each wave spent itself and a new one gathered, she trembled. Tensely she sat there waiting for them to stop. If they didn’t stop, she’d have to die – she’d have to die.”

— Betty Smith

161. “A small child has little idea of the future. Next week is as far ahead as his future stretches and the year between Christmas and Christmas again is an eternity.”

— Betty Smith

162. “She supposed the school was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.”

— Betty Smith

163. “She was made up of all of these good and bad things. 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 quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.”

— Betty Smith

164. “Why, Mrs McGarrity’s all right. Mr McGarrity’s all right, too. Only I guess they aren’t all right to each other.”

— Betty Smith

165. “On a rainy day, she wouldn’t give a lesson. She’d take a block of paper and a stick of charcoal and sketch the poorest, meanest kid in the room. And when the picture was finished, you didn’t see the dirt or the meanness; you saw the glory of innocence and the poignancy of a baby growing up too soon.”

— Betty Smith

166. “His heart was willing but his skill was nil.”

— Betty Smith

167. “She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to act otherwise.”

— Betty Smith

168. “The pickle lasted all day. Francie sucked and nibbled on it. She didn’t exactly eat it. She just had it. When.”

— Betty Smith

169. “Someone has to lose and it’s just as apt to be you as the other fellow.”

— Betty Smith

170. “Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.”

— Betty Smith

171. “Old people are not unhappy. They don’t long for the things we want. They just want to be warm and have soft food to eat and remember things with each other.”

— Betty Smith

172. “Now his children are getting old too, like him, and they have children and nobody wants the old man any more and they are waiting for him to die. But he don’t want to die. He wants to keep on living even though he’s so old and there’s nothing to be happy about any more.”

— Betty Smith

173. “That’s not the point. It was a shrewd move. Teachers are educating future voters. This teacher, for instance, will always say a good word for Tammany to her pupils whenever she can. Every boy has to grow up to vote, you know.”

— Betty Smith

174. “She’d ask nothing more than to look at him and to listen to him for the rest of her life. Then and there, she decided that those privileges were worth slaving for all her life.”

— Betty Smith

175. “Kids grow up quick in this neighborhood.”

— Betty Smith

176. “It’s a fact. They’re gonna stop making liquor and in a few years the country will be dry. A man that works hard has a right to his beer. Tell that to the president and see how far you get. This is a people’s country. If we don’t want it dry, it won’t be dry. Sure.”

— Betty Smith

177. “After the doctor’s outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That’s what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn’t breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies? She.”

— Betty Smith

178. “You had tickets but you thought you could be smart and get something you weren’t entitled to. When people gamble, they think only of winning. They never think of losing. Remember this: Someone has to lose and it’s just as apt to be you as the other fellow. If you learn this lesson by giving up a strip of tickets, you’re paying cheap for the education.”

— Betty Smith

179. “Whether you like it or not, you’ll get yo be twenty-five in time no matter what you do. You might as well be getting educated while you’re going towards it.”

— Betty Smith

180. “She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them.”

— Betty Smith

181. “On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o’clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o’clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they want to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.”

— Betty Smith

182. “It’s just that I feel like glass – that I’ll break in pieces if anybody so much as touches me.”

— Betty Smith

183. “Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush.”

— Betty Smith

184. “He wanted a woman to talk to, one to whom he could tell all his thoughts; and he wanted her to talk to him, warmly, wisely and intimately. If he could find such a woman, he thought, his manhood would come back to him. In his dumb fumbling way, he wanted union of mind and soul along with union of body. As the years passed, the need of talking intimately with a woman who was close to him became an obsession.”

— Betty Smith

185. “She exchanged her tenderness for capability. She gave up her dreams and took over hard realities in their place.”

— Betty Smith

186. “She pointed to a swarm of dirty children playing in the gutter. ‘You could take any one of them and wash him up good and and dress him up and sit him in a fine house and you would think he was beautiful.”

— Betty Smith

187. “It was something that had been born into her and her only – the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life – the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”

— Betty Smith

188. “This child was born of parents who can read and write,” she said simply. “To me, this is a great wonder.”

— Betty Smith

189. “You’re not to cry for him,′ ordered Mama. Her next words had no sense either. ‘He’s out of it now and maybe he’s luckier than we are.”

— Betty Smith

190. “And as he talked, a remarkable.”

— Betty Smith

191. “It was as if nothing wrong could happen in a world where things balanced so stilly.”

— Betty Smith

192. “Katie warned her never to follow the big organ. Katie said that those organ grinders who dressed up so were Sicilians. And all the world knew that the Sicilians belonged to the Black Hand and that the Black Hand Society always kidnapped little children and held them for ransom.”

— Betty Smith

193. “Look how the moon walks on the water.”

— Betty Smith

194. “Mother, I know there are no ghosts or fairies. I would be teaching the child foolish lies.” Mary spoke sharply. “You do not know whether there are not ghosts on earth or angels in heaven.” “I know there is no Santa Claus.” “Yet you must teach the child that these things are so.” “Why? When I, myself, do not believe?” “Because,” explained Mary Rommely simply, “the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination.”

— Betty Smith

195. “She’s a learner and she’ll be somebody someday.”

— Betty Smith

196. “We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves. Papa and I were too different persons and we understood each other. Mama understands Neeley because he’s different from her. I wish I was different in the way that Neeley is.”

— Betty Smith

197. “I give up! I give up,” he shouted and went out and got drunk.”

— Betty Smith

198. “I’m going because I like life,” was her strange reason.”

— Betty Smith

199. “Katie had the same hardships as Johnny and she was nineteen, two years younger. It might be said that she, too, was doomed. Her life, too, was over before it began. But there the similarity ended. Johnny knew he was doomed and accepted it. Katie wouldn’t accept it. She started a new life where her old one left off.”

— Betty Smith

200. “It is not fitting for a good Catholic to say so but I believe that the Protestant Bible contains more of the loveliness of the greatest story on this earth and beyond it. A much-loved Protestant friend once read some of her Bible to me and I found it as I have said.”

— Betty Smith