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Honesty is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experiences of all,
“Francie is entitled to one cup each meal like the rest. If it makes her feel better to throw it away rather than to drink it, all right.
Losher’s smelled kindly of baking bread, and the sun coming in the windows felt good on their old backs. They sat and dozed while the hours passed and felt that they were filling up time. The waiting gave them a purpose in life for a little while and, almost, they felt necessary again.
said Neeley with that combination of agreeing with others, and still sticking to his own opinions, which made him so amiable,
Maybe someday it will be that the Unions will arrange for a man to work and to have time for himself too.
Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things.
If there’s one thing certain, it’s that we all have to get old someday. So get used to the idea as quickly as you can.”
She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.
I knew not how to teach my daughters because I have nothing behind me excepting that for hundreds of years, my family has worked on the land of some overlord.
“I finished the sixth grade, if that is what is called education.” “And your Yohnny”—she could not pronounce “j”—“did too. Don’t you see?” Excitement came into her voice. “Already, it is starting—the getting better.”
“This child was born of parents who can read and write,” she said simply. “To me, this is a great wonder.”
“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.”
“the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. 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.
It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too.
The only way I know what is right and wrong is the way I feel about things. If I feel bad, it’s wrong. If I feel good, it’s right.
All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live.
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.
She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise.
It would seem as if all the unwanted children would stick together and be one against the things that were against them. But not so. They hated each other as much as the teacher hated them. They aped teacher’s snarling manner when they spoke to each other.
Characteristically, they fawned on those close to teacher’s heart. Maybe they figured they were nearer to the throne that way.
“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.
He taught them good music without letting them know it was good.
She’d take a block of paper and a stick of charcoal and sketch the poorest, meanest kid in the room. And when the picture was finished, you didn’t see the dirt or the meanness; you saw the glory of innocence and the poignancy of a baby growing up too soon.
She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
Francie saw a leaf flutter from a tree and she skipped ahead to get it. It was a clear scarlet with an edging of gold. She stared at it, wondering if she’d ever see anything as beautiful again.
It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.
“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.”
When he was drunk, he was a quiet man. He didn’t brawl, he didn’t sing, he didn’t grow sentimental. He grew thoughtful.
“Look at him! Look at him!” a woman cried out. “He did such a great thing and he’s still an ordinary man like my husband only better looking.”
In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story.
One day after one of those “rescues” Francie asked Mama: “When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?” Katie looked tired all of a sudden. She said something Francie didn’t understand at the time. She said, “You found the catch in it.”
If ever I have children I will not read their diaries as I believe that even a child is entitled to some privacy.
“Why should I want to cheat you, Mrs. Nolan?” he asked plaintively as he put the money away carefully. “Why should anyone want to cheat anybody?” she asked in return. “But they do.”
now the cup, the ring and two unironed waiter’s aprons at home were the only concrete objects left to connote that a man had once lived.
“She knows we’ve been crying but she’s not asking questions about it. Mama never…” Suddenly the right word about mama came to Francie. “Mama never fumbles.”
I want her to graduate. My children will be the first ones in the Nolan family to get diplomas.” “You can’t eat a diploma,” said Evy.
because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her
it must be that no one ever dies, really. Papa is gone, but he’s still here in many ways. He’s here in Neeley who looks just like him and in Mama who knew him so long. He’s here in his mother who began him and who is still living. Maybe I will have a boy some day who looks like Papa
“But poverty, starvation and drunkenness are ugly subjects to choose. We all admit these things exist. But one doesn’t write about them.”
“What is beauty?” asked the child. “I can think of no better definition than Keats’: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’” Francie took her courage into her two hands and said, “Those stories are the truth.”
Someday you’ll remember what I said and you’ll thank me for it.” Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down.
She began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people. She wondered, when she got educated, whether she’d be ashamed of her background.
It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.
I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”
“Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.” She waited until the next scream died away. “At least she knows she’s living.”
they suffered with her. It was the only thing the women held in common—the sure knowledge of the pain of giving birth.
She didn’t like her, but she felt sorry for her. Miss Garnder had nothing in all the world excepting a sureness about how right she was.
“This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires.
“And that’s where the whole trouble is,” thought Francie. “We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves.
