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Ann Petry

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Famous Ann Petry Quotes

“She and Bub went to live with Pop in that crowded, musty flat on Seventh Avenue. She hunted for a job with a grim persistence that was finally rewarded, for two weeks later she went to work as a hand presser in a steam laundry. It was hot. The steam was unbearable. But she forced herself to go to night school—studying shorthand and typing and filing. Every time it seemed as though she couldn't possibly summon the energy to go on with the course, she would remind herself of all the people who had got somewhere in spite of the odds against them. She would think of the Chandlers and their young friends—'It's the richest damn country in the world.' Mrs. Chandler wrote her a long letter and Jim forwarded it to her from Jamaica. 'Lutie dear: We haven't had a decent thing to eat since you left. And Little Henry misses you so much he's almost sick—' She didn't answer it. She had more problems than Mrs. Chandler and Little Henry had and they could always find somebody to solve theirs if they paid enough.”

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Book:The Street
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“This world was one of great contrasts, she thought, and if the richest part of it was to be fenced off so that people like herself could only look at it with no expectation of ever being able to get inside it, then it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn't see it, born deaf so you couldn't hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn't feel it. Better still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything, so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe.”

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Book:The Street
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“The attendant looked at Camilo, looked at Link, blandly, incuriously. Link thought, In New York all the black boys who go in for what they like to call Caddies also go in for white girls. So this is old hat to him. He figures that if I'm rich enough--numbers or women or rackets of one kind or another--to drive one of these crates, then almost any good-looking white girl is going to find me acceptable. Money transforms the black male. Makes him beautiful in the eyes of the white female. Black and comely. No. It was black but comely, take it for granted that blackness and comeliness were not only possible but went hand in hand.”

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Book:The Narrows
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“After a year of listening to their talk, she absorbed some of the same spirit. The belief that anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough. Apparently that's what the Pizzinis had done. She and Jim could do the same thing, and she thought she saw what had been wrong with them before--they hadn't tried hard enough, worked long enough, saved enough. There hadn't been any one thing they wanted above and beyond everything else. These people had wanted only one thing--more and more money--and so they got it.”

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Book:The Street
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