Anzia Yezierska Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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.

Anzia Yezierska
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.

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

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

Anzia Yezierska
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?

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

Anzia Yezierska
Ain't I hurt enough without you having to hurt me yet with charity? You want to give me hush money to swallow down unrightness that burns my flesh? I want justice.

Anzia Yezierska
The cold indifference, the each-for-himself look in the eyes of the people about her were like stinging slaps in the face.

Anzia Yezierska
Poverty becomes a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse.

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

Anzia Yezierska
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.

Anzia Yezierska
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.

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

Anzia Yezierska
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.

Anzia Yezierska
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.

Anzia Yezierska
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.

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

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

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

Anzia Yezierska
For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air from the high places where love comes from, and I can't no more come down.

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

Anzia Yezierska
Was she so loved because her eyes were so beautiful, or were her eyes so beautiful because she was so loved?

Anzia Yezierska
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!

Anzia Yezierska
It takes six simpletons and one zealot to start a movement.

Anzia Yezierska
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.

Anzia Yezierska
Jean turned the piano into a human voice, waking them out of sodden sleep. Just listening was living. Life filtered through tired bodies, bent backs. Heads lifted. Fear and worry fled from their eyes. For an instant, they breathed in a fullness of life denied them in life.

Anzia Yezierska