Anzia Yezierska Quotations

I've borne the shame of mother while you bought her off with a present and a treat here and there. God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I'm done for. You fellows had your chance to rise in the world because a man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse.

Those who were high go down low, and those who've been low go up higher.

Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.

The real thing creates its own poetry.

The world is a wheel always turning.

Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.

I tasted the bread and wine of equality.

I too was frightened the first time I felt I hated my father. I felt like a criminal. But could I help it what was inside of me? I had to feel what I felt even if it killed me.

Woe is me! Bitter is me! For what is my life? Why didn't the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Though my father was poor and had nothing, the Torah, the poetry of prophets, was his daily bread.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

If I had never met him I would have dreamed him into being.

I was so obsessed and consumed with my grievances that I could not get away from myself and think things out in the light. I was in the grip of that blinding, destructive, terrible thing -- righteous indignation.

This fire in me, it's not just the hunger of a woman for a man - it's the hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.

At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest, and highest, and I came against the solid wall of the well-fed, well-dressed world - the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness. ... How I pinched, and scraped, and starved myself, to save enough to come to college! Every cent of the tuition fee I paid was drops of sweat and blood from underpaid laundry work. And what did I get for it? A crushed spirit, a broken heart, a stinging sense of poverty that I never felt before.

The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in flight is in us all.

In America, money takes the place of God.

Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams.

As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.

Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut-a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.

When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.