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He stood there with the sunshine dappling him over and sometimes his hooves struck a spark from the stones as he pawed the ground.
Little white poodles were favorite pets in Brooklyn.
The woman who owned a poodle was usually small, plump, white, soiled and with rheumy eyes just like a poodle.
noted how pale and thin the late afternoon sun was on the worn fence boards.
Since the beginning of time, everyone, especially the Irish, had loved and cared for the singer in their midst.
Again that hurt around Francie’s heart. He didn’t want her or Neeley?
looked at the little girl ironing away so quietly with her head bent over the board and he was stabbed by the soft sadness on the child’s thin face.
swore that her crying was as varied and as tuneful as an opera singer’s range.
Other
waiters wore readymade bows attached to elastics.
like a lamp protected from the wind.
tarleton
Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things.
Sissy treated them like important human beings.
They don’t long for the things we want. They
Weg Geschnissen,
loving the drumbeat rhythm of the cleavers. Again
The line was longest at Father O’Flynn’s cubicle. He was young, kind, tolerant and easy on the penances.
He started whispering rapidly and monotonously in Latin with his eyes closed. She caught the mingled odors of incense, candle wax, flowers, and the good black cloth and shaving lotion of the priest. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned….”
Evy assured him in her soft tender voice that was a caress in itself.
thoughts about the nasturtiums in the brown bowl and the way the horse had looked being washed while standing in sunshine and shadow. She was growing drowsy. She listened a moment to Katie and Johnny talking in the kitchen. They were reminiscing.
The sweet-smelling warm wind moved gently in Francie’s hair. She folded her arms on the window sill and laid her cheek on them. She could look up and see the stars high above the tenement roofs. After a while she went to sleep.
so-significant conversation with its delicious pauses and thrilling undercurrents of emotion, they came to know that they loved each other passionately.
Gott verdammte
revered God and loved Jesus, but she understood why people often turned away from these Two.
She understood why people had to lie and steal and harm one another. She knew of all pitiful human weaknesses and of many cruel strengths.
She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.
But they were made out of thin invisible steel.
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.
“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?”
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.
cruet
was the first of many disillusionments that were to come as her capacity to feel things grew. She never liked blackboard erasers after that.
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.
“Forgiveness,” said Mary Rommely, “is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.”
They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.
There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory.
been standing there more than a hundred years before when Big Chief Tammany
Beer flowed like a Brooklyn gutter after a rainstorm.
“Look how the moon walks on the water.”
that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts.
What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction.
Then she added, “May you walk with the angels always.”
takes a lot of doing to die.
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 had heard Papa sing so many songs about the heart; the heart that was breaking—was aching—was dancing—was heavy laden—that leaped for joy—that was heavy in sorrow—that turned over—that stood still. She really believed that the heart actually did those things. She was terrified thinking
and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”
“Besides, there is this: If you love someone, you’d rather suffer the pain alone to spare them. So keep your man out of the house when your time comes.”
And Francie, pausing in her sweeping to listen, tried to put everything together and tried to understand a world spinning in confusion. And it seemed to her that the whole world changed in between the time that Laurie was born and graduation day.
Miss Garnder had nothing in all the world excepting a sureness about how right she was.
