" Only millionaires can be alone in America.

You know the old saying: Money lost, nothing lost. Hope lost, all is lost. The less money I have, the more I live on hope. And hope is the only reality here on earth. It's hope that makes people build cities and span bridges and send ships from one end of the earth to another. Even dying, man plants his hope on the next world.

It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman enter Heaven.

In America, women don't need men to boss them.

For the first time in my life I saw what a luxury it was for a poor girl to want to be alone in a room.

Even in our worst poverty we sat around the table, together, like people.

I never knew that there were people glad enough of life to celebrate the day they were born.

The routine with which I kept clean my precious privacy, my beautiful aloneness, was all sacred to me. I had achieved that marvelous thing, "a place for everything and everything in its place", which the teacher preached to me so hopelessly as a child in Hester Street.

I had it ingrained in me from my father, this exalted reverence for the teacher. "

― Anzia Yezierska , Bread Givers