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'Dear God,' she prayed, 'let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.'

Betty Smith

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Betty Smith
Age: 75 †
Born: 1896
Born: December 15
Died: 1972
Died: January 17
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Elisabeth Lillian Wehner
Minutes
Grows
Hours
Prayed
Beautiful
Brooklyn
Every
Minute
Something
Hour
Life
Dear
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She had had the pain it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it
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From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.
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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.
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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.
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Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?
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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.
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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.
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They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.
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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.
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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.
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A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
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In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
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The world was hers for the reading.
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Well, there's a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.
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It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn't want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that.
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Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.
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It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.
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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.
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And you must tell the child the legends I told you - as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must tell of those not of the earth who live forever in the hearts of the people.
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As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.
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