Jeannette Walls

“Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.”

“Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.”

“sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it”

“I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.”

“I hate Erma," I told Mom..."You have to show compassion for her..." She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. "Everyone has something good about them," she said. "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.""Oh yeah?" I said. "How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?""Hitler loved dogs," Mom said without hesitation.”

“Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I 'd have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. "A package that's been opened once doesn't have the same appeal".”

“New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.”

“If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.”

“Everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.”

“The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react”

“A lady's hair is her crowning glory”

“In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.”

“God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.”

“Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail- the gumption to try and save ourselves- isn't that what he wanted us to do?”

“She never felt sorry for herself, and that was something I decided I admired most in people.”

“Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.”

“It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.”

“Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.”

“You didn't need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.”

“You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.”

“Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.”

“If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.”

“Unlike diamonds, watches were practical. They were for people on the run, people with appointments to keep and schedules to meet.”

“Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.”

“What doesn't kill you will make you stronger”

“All seasons have something to offer”

“You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man”

“She had her addictions and one of them was reading.”

“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

“Life there was hard and it made people hard.”

“Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are”

“You should never hate anyone, not even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You had to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”

“Sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better.”

“If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.”

“No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.”

“You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.”

“You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim”

“Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.”

“People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...”

“Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.”

“Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear.”

“The place where you live - your home - is one of the most important things in a body's life.”

“Teaching is a calling too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy - angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.”

“[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.”

“What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.”

“Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.”

“I’d rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than withtrashy lawn ornaments.”

“The road was called Agnes weeps, after the town's first schoolteacher, who had burst into tears when she saw how plunging and twisting the road was and realized how remote the town must be. But from the first moment I laid eyes on it, I loved that road. I thought of it as a winding staircase taking me out of the traffic jams, news bulletins, bureaucrats, air-raid sirens and locked doors of city life. Jim said we should rename the road Lilly sings.”

“Brian told Mom we needed to keep Maureen away from those nutty Pentecostals, but Mom said we all came to religion in our own individual ways and we each need to respect the religious practices of others, seeing as it was up to every human being to find his or her own way to heaven.”

“I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.”