I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner | when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired. She dropped on the bench b… - Anzia Yezierska

Ever since I began to read the American magazines one burning question has consumed me: Why is it that only the thoughts of educated people are written up? Why shouldn't sometimes a servant girl or a janitress or a coal-heaver give his thoughts to the world? We who are forced to do the drudgery of the world, and who are considered ignorant because we have no time for school, could say a lot of new and different things, if only we had a chance to get a hearing.
Very rarely I'd come across a story about a shop-girl or a washerwoman. But they weren't real stories. They were twisted pictures of the way the higher-ups see us people. They weren't as we are. They were as unreal as the knowledge of the rich about the poor. Often I'd read those smooth-flowing stories about nothing at all, and I'd ask myself, Why is it that so many of the educated, with nothing to say, know how to say that nothing with such an easy flow of words, while I, with something so aching to be said, can say nothing?
I was like a prison world full of choked-in voices, all beating in my brain to be heard. The minute I'd listen to one voice a million other voices would rush in crying for a hearing, till I'd get too excited and mixed up to know what or where.

"...When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts." ("Wings")

on the train as I faced my disgrace, I saw that Hollywood was not my success, nor my present poverty and anonymity, failure. I saw that "success," "failure," "poverty," "riches," were price tags, money values of the market place which had mesmerized and sidetracked me for years.