A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Quotes

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

“There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. 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

“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 past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Books became her friends, and there was one for every mood.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman... whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have. Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.”
― 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

“Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She loved books. She loved them with her senses and her intellect. They way they looked and smelled; the way they felt in her hands; the way the pages seemed to murmur as she turned them. Everything there is in the world, she thought, is in books.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“It doesn't take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

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

“I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. 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. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good and these bad things.
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. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Kitie's secret, desparing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.
She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It 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

“From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again. ”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing … something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?"

"The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The difference between rich and poor", said Francie, "is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“All my life I've been lonely. I've been lonely at crowded parties. I've been lonely in the middle of kissing a girl and I've been lonely at camp with hundreds of fellows around. But now I'm not lonely any more.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“people always think that happiness is a far away thing, something complicated and hard to get. yet, 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 little things make happiness.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said,

"You have a bad case, a very bad case."

"Of what?"

"Growing up.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children. How she loved children! She loved loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her infrequent confessions because she felt sorry for him. She thought he was missing the greatest joy on earth by being committed to a life of celibacy.
She loved all the scratching curs on the street and wept for the gaunt scavenging cats who slunk around Brooklyn corners with their sides swollen looking for a hole in which they might bring forth their young. She loved the sooty sparrows and thought that the very grass that grew in the lots was beautiful. She picked bouquets of white clover in the lots believing they were the most beautiful flowers God ever made...Yes, she listened to everybody's troubles but no one listened to hers. But that was right because Sissy was a giver and never a taker.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“This could be a whole life," she thought. "You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this...”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Growing up spoiled a lot of things. It spoiled the nice game they had when there was nothing to eat in the house. When money gave out and food ran low, Katie and the children pretended they were explorers discovering the North Pole and had been trapped by a blizzard in a cave with just a little food. They had to make it last till help came. Mama divided up what food there was in the cupboard and called it rations and when the children were still hungry after a meal, she'd say, 'Courage, my men, help will come soon.' When some money came in and Mama bought a lot of groceries, she bought a little cake as celebration, and she'd stick a penny flag in it and say, 'We made it, men. We got to the North Pole.'
One day after one of the 'rescues' Francie asked Mama:
'When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it's for a reason . Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big things comes out of us being hungry like that?'
Katie looked tired all of a sudden. She said something Francie didn't understand at the time. She said, 'You found the catch in it.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“New York! I've always wanted to see it and now I've see it. It's true what they say-- it's the most wonderful city in the world.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Then I've been drunk, too," admitted Francie.

"On beer?"

"No. Last spring, in McCarren's Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Because 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 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