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All of this takes place in the life of Francie Nolan, who is eleven years old when her story opens in the summer of 1912, in a third-floor walk-up apartment in the shadow of the hardy urban ailanthus tree, the “only tree that grew out of cement,” a tree “that liked poor people.”
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.
He may rise—but only to his father’s state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.”
“It is not fitting for a good Catholic to say so but I believe that the Protestant Bible contains more of the loveliness of the greatest story on this earth and beyond it.
“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. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.
In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”
The Bible, while a little harder to come by, was cheaper in the long run. In fact, it cost Sissy nothing. It had a name, Gideon, on the front.
“People swipe it, read it, reform and repent. They bring it back and buy another one, too, so that other people can swipe, read and reform. In that way, the firm that puts out the books loses nothing.”
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.”
OH, MAGIC HOUR WHEN A CHILD FIRST KNOWS IT CAN READ PRINTED WORDS!
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.
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.
June 27. We finished the Bible today. Now we got to start all over. We’ve gone through Shakespeare four times already.
“Brooklyn. It’s a magic city and it isn’t real.”
when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
“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.”
