Bread Givers Quotes

“I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“There is justice nowhere for a fool. A fool they whip even in the Holy Temple.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“Only millionaires can be alone in America.

You know the old saying: Money lost, nothing lost. Hope lost, all is lost. The less money I have, the more I live on hope. And hope is the only reality here on earth. It's hope that makes people build cities and span bridges and send ships from one end of the earth to another. Even dying, man plants his hope on the next world.

It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman enter Heaven.

In America, women don't need men to boss them.

For the first time in my life I saw what a luxury it was for a poor girl to want to be alone in a room.

Even in our worst poverty we sat around the table, together, like people.

I never knew that there were people glad enough of life to celebrate the day they were born.

The routine with which I kept clean my precious privacy, my beautiful aloneness, was all sacred to me. I had achieved that marvelous thing, "a place for everything and everything in its place", which the teacher preached to me so hopelessly as a child in Hester Street.

I had it ingrained in me from my father, this exalted reverence for the teacher.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“Beloved, Dearest One:
How I long to shout to the world our happiness. I feel that you and I are the only two people alive in the world - the only people that know the secret meaning of existence.
I have no diamond rings, no gifts of love that other lovers have for their beloved. My poetry is all I have to offer you. And so I dedicate my collected verses, 'Poems of Poverty,' to you, beloved.
Morris.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“Blood-and-iron! How dare you question your father his business? What’s the world coming to in this wild America? No respect for fathers. No fear of God.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“Lunatic!” shrieked Mother. “You, without a shekel to your name!”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“Woe to a man who has females for his offspring,” he went on.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“With me for their father they get their dowries in their brains and in their good looks.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“But didn’t you say that the poorest beggars are happier and freer than the rich?” I dared question Father. “You said that a poor man never has to be afraid of thieves or robbers. He can walk alone in the middle of the night and fear nobody. Poor people don’t need locks on their houses. They can leave their doors wide open, because nobody will come to steal poverty...”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“How long will love last with a husband who feeds you with hunger? Even Job said, of all his sufferings, nothing was so terrible as poverty. A poor man is a living dead one. Even dead you got to have money.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“A writer, a poet you want for a husband? Those who sell the papers at least earn something. But what earns a poet? Do you want starvation and beggary for the rest of your days? Who’ll pay your rent? Who’ll buy you your bread? Who’ll put shoes on the feet of your children, with a husband who wastes his time writing poems of poverty instead of working for a living?”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“And then I thought, what kind of a man could I get if I smell from selling herring? A son from Zalmon the fish-peddler?”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“But Bessie brings me in every cent she earns. When a girl like mine leaves the house the father gets poorer, not richer. It’s not enough to take my Bessie without a dowry. You must pay me yet.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

“A poor man is a living dead one.”
― Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers