A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Quotes

“Oh, I want to hold it all!" she cried. "I want to hold the way the night is—cold without wind. And the way the stars are so near and shiny. I want to hold all of it tight until it hollers out, 'Let me go! Let me go!”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Before school, there had to be vaccination. That was the law. How it was dreaded! 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 they got out of the explanation was that germs would be put into a healthy child’s body. Some foreign-born parents refused to permit their children to be vaccinated. They were not allowed to enter school. Then the law got after them for keeping the children out of school. A free country? they asked. You should live so long. What’s free about it, they reasoned, when the law forces you to educate your children and then endangers their lives to get them into school? Weeping mothers brought bawling children to the health center for inoculation. They carried on as though bringing their innocents to the slaughter. The children screamed hysterically at the first sight of the needle and their mothers, waiting in the anteroom, threw their shawls over their heads and keened loudly as if wailing for the dead. Francie”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“And she doesn’t have to worry about me, either. I don’t need to drink to get drunk. I can get drunk on things like the tulip—and this night.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The pipe came from Sissy’s factory. The factory made a few rubber toys as a blind. It made its big profits from other rubber articles which were bought in whispers.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Maybe,” thought Francie, “she doesn’t love me as much as she loves Neeley. But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved.”
― 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.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s. Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all of her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader. She read everything she could find: trash, classics, time tables and the grocer’s price list. Some”
― 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

“They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted. a”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She looked at the nurse. To Francie, all women were mamas like her own mother and Aunt Sissy and Aunt Evy. She thought the nurse might say something like:
"Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash her good this morning," or, "You know how it is, Doctor, children will play in dirt." But what the nurse actually said was, "I
know. Isn't it terrible? I sympathize with you, Doctor. There is no excuse for these people living in filth."

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot-strap 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 up climb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the
courage to be otherwise.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-in-arm, sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other, standing closely and in silence in a vestibule. Everyone in the world but Francie had a sweetheart or a friend. She seemed to be the only lonely one in Brooklyn.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“You must learn to take a joke, Francie, otherwise life will be pretty hard on you.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life. They are his contact with the supplies that keep life going; they hold the beauty that his soul longs for; they hold the unattainable that he can only dream and wish for.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“That is what is called learning the truth. 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. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have a practice in disappoinment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I think it's good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Several times that day, the name or thought of Papa had come up. And each time, Francie had felt a flash of tenderness instead of the old stab of pain. "Am I forgetting him?" she thought. "In time to come, will it be hard to remember anything about him? I guess it's like Granma Mary Rommely says: 'With time, passes all.' The first year was hard because we could say last 'lection he voted. Last Thanksgiving he ate with us. But next year it will be two years ago that he...and as time passes it will be harder and harder to remember and keep track.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Do you hear that, Francie? You're in college! 'oh gosh, I feel sick.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Money! Would that make it better for them? Yes, it would make it easy. But no, the money wouldn't be enough… That means there must be something bigger than money… An answer came to Katie. It was so simple that a flash of astonishment that felt like a pain shot through her head. Education!”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Anybody," said Johnny, carried away by his personal dream of Democracy, "can ride in one of the hansom cabs, provided," he qualified, "they get the money. So you can see what a free country we got here."

"What's free about it if you have to pay?" asked Francie.

"It's free in this way: If you have the money you're allowed to ride in them no matter who you are. In the old countries, certain people aren't free to ride in them, even if they have the money.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When the strong healthy boy, howling at the indignity of the birth process, was put to her breast, she felt a wild tenderness for him, The other baby, Francis, in the crib next her bed, began to whimper. Katie had a flash of contempt for the weak child she had borne a year ago, when she compared her to this new handsome son. She was quickly ashamed of hr contempt. She knew it wasn't the little girl's fault. "I must watch myself carefully," she thought. "I am going to love this boy more than the girl but I mustn't ever let her know. It is wrong to love one child more than the other but this is something that I cannot help.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I believe in the Lord, Jesus Christ, and His Mother, Holy Mary. Jesus was a living baby once. He went bare-footed like we do in the summer. I saw a picture where He was a boy and had no shoes on. And when He was a man, He went fishing, like papa did once. And they could hurt Him, too, like they couldn't hurt God. Jesus wouldn't go around punishing people. He knew about people. So I will always believe in Jesus Chirst.'
They made the sign of the cross as Catholics do when mentioning Jesus' name. Then she put her hand on Neely's knee and spoke in a whisper.
'Neely, I wouldn't tell anybody but you, but I don't believe in God anymore.'
'I want to go home,' said Neely. He was shivering.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“A wave of hurt broke over Francie and left her weak when it was passed. Another wave came, broke and receded. She found her way down to the cellar of her house and sat in the darkest corner on a heap of burlap sacks and waited while the hurt waves swept over her. As each wave spent itself and a new one gathered, she trembled. Tensely she sat there waiting for them to stop. If they didn't stop, she'd have to die--she'd have to die.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Ghosts are not always those who pass through closed doors,” said Mary Rommely. “Katie has told how her husband used to talk to this saloon man. In all those years of the talking, Yohnny gave away pieces of himself to this man. When Katie called on her man for help, the pieces of him came together in this man, and it was Yohnny within the saloon man’s soul that heard and came to her help.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Good-bye, Francie”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence, and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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

“Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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 figured she’d have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn