I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going
through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply, "I stood
yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about
what might happen tomorrow."
I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of
my strength. As I look back upon my
life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and
broken hopes and shattered illusions--a battle in which I always fought with
the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and
maimed and old before my time.
Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the
past and gone shadows; no envy for the women who have been spared all I have
gone through. For I have lived.
They only existed. I
have drunk the cup of life down to its very dregs. They have only sipped the bubbles on top of
it. I know things they will never
know. I see things to which they are
blind. It is only the women whose eyes
have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them
little sisters to all the world.
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I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to
borrow trouble by dreading the morrow. It is the dark menace of the picture
that makes cowards of us. I put that
dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I
so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me. Little annoyances no longer have the power to
affect me. After you have seen your
whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never
matters to you again that a servant forgets to put doilies under the finger
bowls, or the cook spills the soup.
I have learned not to expect too much of people, and so I
can still get happiness out of the friend who isn't quite true to me or the
acquaintance who gossips. Above all, I
have acquired a sense of humor, because there were so many things over which I
had either to cry or laugh. And when a
woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever
hurt her much again. I do not regret the
hardships I have known, because through them I have touched life at every point I have lived. And it was
worth the price I had to pay.
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