Betty Smith Quotes

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

You can't fake it when you're alone with God, you know.

Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth/

Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial-largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox-in other words,-all the things I love the most.

It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.... There is a truth which is of Satan. Its essence is that under the semblance of truth it denies everything that is real. It lives upon hatred of the real world which is created and loved by God.

The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'

Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

Blues is not a dream, blues is truth.

A body is merely a vehicle. The deepest emotions are experienced through the soul.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.

Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback.

True liars never love. True lovers never lie.

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

"I'm sorry," she said humbly. "I haven't wanted to lie to you." "I should hope so. You're the worst liar I've ever met." He thought about it for a moment, then added, " - or the best. Now I'm all confused.