A Tree Grows In Brooklyn Quotes
"No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky."
"It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it."
"The dog, a gentle Labrador retriever, was a friend who nightly waited for me at the corner because he enjoyed a companionable walk to town."
"I am grateful to my children whose baby years made a life of pleasant contentment for me."
"I am indebted to chance acquaintances on trains and in bus stations for exchanged confidences about the everlasting verities of life."
"I am tenderly grateful to an employer of long ago who on a hot August afternoon told me that the job I was applying for had been filled but who urged me to sit down and rest a minute before I went on to answer the next ad."
"But I do want to dedicate this special edition...to all of you who've read it and to you who are reading it now."
"SERENE was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York."
"It was an awful lot of water and very little coffee but mama put a lump of chicory in it which made it taste strong and bitter."
"If I get a lot of tips tonight, I'll put the money on a good horse that I know is running Monday."
"I drink because I got responsibilities that I can't handle."
"I was seventeen when I first met you," Katie was saying, "and I was working in the Castle Braid Factory."
"In all the world, there was nobody like Johnny."
"It was something that had been born into her and her only—the something different from anyone else in the two families."
"You must read every day, I know this is the secret."
"Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child."
"The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were."
"She was made up of all of these good and these bad things."
"She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children."
"The child must be made to believe in heaven."
"You married him because you wanted him to sleep with you but you were too religious to take a chance without a church wedding."
"Books became her friends and there was one for every mood."
"Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing."
"Books were her friends and there was one for every mood."
"She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends."
"She made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived."
"The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance."
"There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours."
"There would be love stories when she came into adolescence."
"How wonderful was Brooklyn, she thought, when just being born there automatically made you an American!"
"There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky."
"You must make up for the wrong by being twice as good."
"They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second generation Americans."
"What's the tree to me? I ain't a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin'. No, I ain't big enough. I ain't big enough to do a thing like that."
"She was paying for the lie and for the doll by giving up her pride."
"There is always a wrong and a right way to get on a boat," said Johnny, who had never been on any boat except an excursion boat once.
"Don't any of you damned kids dare to laugh!" He climbed into the boat almost upsetting it.
"Johnny's collar and dicky were a sodden paperish mess. He stripped them off and threw them overboard."
"This is the life," he said. "Away from the maddening crowd. Ah, there's nothing like going down to the sea in a ship."
"The principal thing," said papa, "is that I am bringing home fish that were caught at Canarsie."
"Speak!" She screamed. "Say something." Finally Little Tilly opened her mouth, smiled happily and said, "T'anks."
"Intolerance," she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, "is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and to each other."
"She has skin like a magnolia petal," said Johnny. "Her hair is as black as a raven's wing."
"As long as I live, I will never have a woman for a friend. I will never trust any woman again, except maybe mama and sometimes Aunt Evy and Aunt Sissy."
"Today, I enter my teens. What will the year bring forth? I wonder."
"I'm no good anymore. I can't sing anymore. Katie, they laugh at me now when I sing."
"You just get a good rest and get on your feet again and they'll be glad to take you in."
"I am burning ugliness. I am burning ugliness."
"I can't count on Neeley because a boy's no use at a time like this. I need you badly now."
"Being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better."
"I couldn't be that lucky - to have a baby all of a sudden."
"While I ... I ... just don't know the right things to say to make you feel better."
"Women make [men] stand next to them. They want them to hear every moan and groan and see every drop of blood and hear every tear of the flesh."
"If you love someone, you'd rather suffer the pain alone to spare them."
"It will be nice, Mama, when there are four of us again."
"You can go on with what you have inside you, like I can."
"There'd be no wars today, If mothers all would say, I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."
"The good old days! Yeah. I guess they're gone forever."
"I wish you luck, I wish you joy. I wish you first, a baby boy."
"When night draws back the curtain, And pins it with a star, Remember I am still your friend, Though you may wander far."
"Life's too short. If you ever find a man you love, don't waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, 'I love you. How about getting married?'"
"I want to ask your advice, Mama. There was this boy I met in summer school. He said he might write but he never has. I want to know would it look forward if I sent him a Christmas card?"
"I'm a failure," he pulled the blanket up over his head.
"We're all cute." The girls laughed. "Our supervisor's cute—the old wagon. I hope she chokes."
"Send Francie. The last time I asked for sauerkraut he chased me out of the store," complained Neeley.
"I wasn't snooping," said Katie indignantly. "I needed another nickel for the gas man and I thought you wouldn't care. You look in my pocketbook for change many a time."
"I'm cute," said Francie with mock belligerence.
"I've been working less than a year and I've had three jobs already."
"If I can fix every detail of this time in my mind, I can keep this moment always," she thought.
"People always think that happiness is a faraway thing, something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up."
"Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him."
"I love you. I wouldn't be ashamed...afterwards if I stayed with you. I'd be proud and happy and I wouldn't want to lie about it."
"As a woman... It would have been a very beautiful thing. Because there is only once that you love that way."
"I remember you used to be a skinny long-legged kid. Well, I think you'll make a nice-looking woman some day."
"I guess you have to go. I guess that it's right that you see your mother once more before... I don't know. But I guess it's right."