Quotes from Wendy McClure

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.

From everything that I'd read, End Timers were waiting for the collapse of civilization the way fans of the Twilight series awaited the trailer for Breaking Dawn.

subtitled it 'Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask.

It didn't feel like the last night of anything anymore, just that the world went on and would follow us home

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa's time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button.

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress.

The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's.

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

The fact that Nellie wasn't any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura's antagonists' worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts.

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.

think I have sort of an odd aversion, almost like a chemical sensitivity, when it comes to other people's enthusiasm.

Hey Almanzo, if you liked it then you should've built a shanty on it.