A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Quotes

“There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard unfamiliar things, there is here—hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. 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.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She went to the public school that the three youngest girls attended and in halting English told the teacher that the children must be encouraged to speak only English; they were not to use a German word or phrase ever. In that way, she protected them against their father. She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship. Each”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“But he refused to answer when addressed in English and forbade the speaking of English in his home. His daughters understood very little German. (Their mother insisted that the girls speak only English in the home. She reasoned that the less they understood German, the less they would find out about the cruelty of their father.) Consequently, the four daughters grew up having little communion with their father. He never spoke to them except to curse them. His Gott verdammte came to be regarded as hello and good-bye. When very angry, he’d call the object of his temper, Du Russe! This he considered his most obscene expletive. He hated Austria. He hated America. Most of all he hated Russia. He had never been to that country and had never laid eyes on a Russian. No one understood his hatred of that dimly known country and its vaguely known people. This was the man who was Francie’s maternal grandfather. She hated him the way his daughters hated him. *”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When she thought she was nearly finished, she noticed that the next shelf started up again with Browne. After that came Browning. She groaned, anxious to get into the C’s where there was a book by Marie Corelli that she had peeped into and found thrilling. Would she ever get to that? Maybe she ought to read two books a day. Maybe…. She”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Now his children are getting old too, like him, and they have children and nobody wants the old man any more and they are waiting for him to die. But he don’t want to die. He wants to keep on living even though he’s so old and there’s nothing to be happy about anymore.” The”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts. You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people. That”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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. a”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When the health authorities tried to explain to the poor and illiterate that vaccination was a giving of the harmless form of smallpox to work up immunity against the deadly form, the parents didn’t believe it. All”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“would never stop coming. It was Francie’s first experience with infinity.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The world was hers for the reading a”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Mama never fumbles.” No,”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“He was willing to exchange soul-destroying suspicion for heartbreaking reality. Accordingly,”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The pickle lasted all day. Francie sucked and nibbled on it. She didn’t exactly eat it. She just had it. When”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Katie heard the story. “It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm them—I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them.” Francie”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“OH, MAGIC HOUR WHEN A CHILD FIRST KNOWS IT CAN READ PRINTED WORDS! For”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“hc.com.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“but her body was fuller.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“was something that had been born into her and her only-the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life-the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“THE library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library paste and freshly-inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Katie held the coffeepot in one hand and the saucepan of hot milk in the other and poured both into the cups simultaneously. “I remember,” she said, “when there was no milk in the house. Your father would put a lump of butter in his coffee—if we had butter. He said that butter was cream in the first place and just as good in coffee.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“FRANCIE CAME AWAY FROM HER FIRST CHEMISTRY LECTURE IN A GLOW. In one hour she had found out that everything was made up of atoms which were in continual motion. She grasped the idea that nothing was ever lost or destroyed. Even if something was burned up or left to rot away, it did not disappear from the face of the earth; it changed into something else—gases, liquids, and powders. Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“They say God’s so great,” said Francie scornfully, “and knows everything and can do everything. If He’s so great, why didn’t He help Papa instead of punishing him like you said?” “I just said maybe.” “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.” “I don’t think you should talk about God like that,” said Neeley uneasily. “He might strike you down dead.” “Then let Him,” cried Francie fiercely. “Let Him strike me down dead right here in the gutter where I sit!”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She said: “You have all seen an example of the true Christmas spirit. Little Mary is a very rich little girl and received many beautiful dolls for Christmas. But she was not selfish. She wanted to make some poor little Mary, who is not as fortunate as herself, happy. So she gave the doll to that poor little girl who is named Mary, too.” Francie’s eyes smarted with hot tears. “Why can’t they,” she thought bitterly, “just give the doll away without saying I am poor and she is rich? Why couldn’t they just give it away without all the talking about it?”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“JOHNNY WAS ONE FOR TAKING NOTIONS. HE’D TAKE A NOTION THAT life was too much for him and start drinking heavier to forget”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“OH, MAGIC HOUR WHEN A CHILD FIRST KNOWS IT CAN READ PRINTED WORDS!”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Katie! Don’t nag! All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live. You’ve got a good man, Katie.” “But he drinks.” “And he always will until he dies. There it is. He drinks. You must take that along with the rest.” “What rest? You mean the not working, the staying out all night, the bums he has for friends?” “You married him. There was something about him that caught your heart. Hang on to that and forget the rest.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn