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Francie felt that Sissy understood how it was with little girls. Other people treated children like lovable but necessary evils. Sissy treated them like important human beings.
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. Yet she could not read or write.
She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.
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.
She had borne a child but two hours ago. She was so weak that she couldn’t lift her head an inch from the pillow, yet it was she who comforted him and told him not to worry, that she would take care of him.
When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”
“It’s not better to die. Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”
She exchanged her tenderness for capability. She gave up her dreams and took over hard realities in their place. 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.
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.
person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.
They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.
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.
It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman…whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.
If He went around looking into people’s windows like you say, He’d see how things were here; He’d see that it was cold and that there was no food in the house; He’d see that Mama isn’t strong enough to work so hard. And He’d see how Papa was and He’d do something about Papa.
“If God has charge of all the world,” said Francie, “and the sun and the moon and the stars and all the birds and trees and flowers and all the animals and people, you’d think He’d be too busy and too important—wouldn’t you—to spend so much time punishing one man—one man like Papa.”
“Neeley, I wouldn’t tell anybody but you, but I don’t believe in God anymore.”
I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”
“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; a place of shelter when it rains—a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone—just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”
She tore the sheet in half. “No! I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me…I want someone to need me.” She wept again, but not so hard this time.
“Laurie’s going to have a mighty easy life all right.” “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.” “Gosh! We did have fun, didn’t we, Neeley?” “Yeah!” “Poor Laurie,” said Francie pityingly.
The tree whose leaf umbrellas had curled around, under and over her fire escape had been cut down because the housewives complained that wash on the lines got entangled in its branches. The landlord had sent two men and they had chopped it down. But the tree hadn’t died…it hadn’t died. A new tree had grown from the stump and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were no wash lines above it. Then it had started to grow towards the sky again.
Annie, the fir tree, that the Nolans had cherished with waterings and manurings, had long since sickened and died. But this tree in the yard—this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up its stump—this tree lived!
