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.

From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.

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.

Well' Francie decided, 'I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but'.

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him.

I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.

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.