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1 " I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company. "
― Anzia Yezierska , Bread Givers
2 " Beloved, Dearest One:How I long to shout to the world our happiness. I feel that you and I are the only two people alive in the world - the only people that know the secret meaning of existence.I have no diamond rings, no gifts of love that other lovers have for their beloved. My poetry is all I have to offer you. And so I dedicate my collected verses, 'Poems of Poverty,' to you, beloved.Morris. "
3 " A poor man is a living dead one. "
4 " The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me. "
5 " There is justice nowhere for a fool. A fool they whip even in the Holy Temple. "
6 " 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. "