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She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely’s mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones.
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.”
A 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.
“Mama never fumbles.”
’Cause. When she looked at the money, I saw that tears stood in her eyes.”
“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me
be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.
“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.”
And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.
“To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
