Top 200 Betty Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Hope ever urges on, and tells us tomorrow will be better.”

— Betty Smith

157. “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?”

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Betty Smith

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Betty Smith

168. “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

169. “Till We Meet Again.”

— Betty Smith

170. “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

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

— Betty Smith

172. “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

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

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Betty Smith

183. “Will it be that as I get older all the things that I’m figuring out now and thinking are so right... all... all will have holes in them? Is that what getting old means? That you realize what a dope you were when you were young?”

— Betty Smith

184. “Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her, and she was unfaithful to him.”

— Betty Smith

185. “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

186. “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

187. “It might be that the infected child would be given a clean bill next examination. In that case, she, in turn, would torment those found guilty, forgetting her own hurt at being tormented. They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.”

— Betty Smith

188. “Of course not. But write it down.”

— Betty Smith

189. “If I can fix every detail of this time in my mind, I can keep this moment always.”

— Betty Smith

190. “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

191. “From now on, would all new things be disappointing, she wondered?”

— Betty Smith

192. “He wasn’t exactly a bum, he was just a weak man who whined all the time. But he played the guitar.”

— Betty Smith

193. “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

194. “She grew an answering hardness against her mother and this hardness, paradoxically enough, brought them a little closer together because it made them more alike.”

— Betty Smith

195. “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

196. “When the health authorities tried to explain to the poor and illiterate that vaccination was a giving of the harmless form of smallpox to work up immunity against the deadly form, the parents didn’t believe it. All.”

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

198. “It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.”

— Betty Smith

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

— Betty Smith

200. “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