Betty Smith Quotes

I've had to walk through a lot of my tears.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

1967 was the bleakest, darkest, most emotional period of my life.

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

Then teach me how to not care about someone who was everything to me. All I want is to know she's okay. Is that too much to ask?

My Brother starv'd between two Walls,His Children's Cry my Soul appalls

How could you stop loving me?

There's nothing more heart-breaking than watching your children suffer.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it.

The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.

Some troubles no one else should have to endure,especially not those you love.

Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.

I would never write about anyone who is not at the end of his rope.

He broke my heart, and now it's raining, just to rub it in.

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

You can’t walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don’t want it now or ever again. Don’t want to hear the word or wear its scars.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.