264 Quotes by Betty Smith

Obscenities are the emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies.

Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

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.

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

Intolerance,' she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, "is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world." She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them. She closed the book and put it away.

She wanted to own a book so badly and she had thought the copying would do it. 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. a

But she didn't want to recall things. She wanted to live things — or as a compromise, relive rather than reminisce.

Who'd ever guess," said Francie, ¨looking at the outside of him, that he was so different inside?¨

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.