More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The difference was that Flossie Gaddis was starved about men and Sissy was healthily hungry about them. And what a difference that made.
Francie was glad for Saturday and hated to end it by going to sleep. Already the dread of the week to come made her uneasy.
Although he did not belong to her, Katie was proud of him.
She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.
The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn’t give you warmth when it shines on you.
The regimented routine of many children, all doing the same thing at once, gave her a feeling of safety.
There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory.
“I could have been friends with them all the time. I thought they didn’t want to be friends. It must have been me that was wrong.”
“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up;
“Annie Laurie McShane! She’ll never have the hard times we had, will she?” “No. And she’ll never have the fun we had, either.”
The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. 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.
She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.
