Quotes from Jeannette Walls

If you want to live in the farmland, haul your sorry hide off to Pennsylvania.

Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true —Dylan Thomas, 'Poem on His Birthday

Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven," Aunt Al said. " Ã¢â'¬ËœFor there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.' 

It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us.

She also lent me her books, saying reading was a way of traveling the world, getting to know people you'll never meet, also traveling through time, getting to know people who lived long ago.

For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn't do any good

If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about

I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire.

No one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.

The inconsistent spelling of words in the English language also vexed Dad to no end. Digraphs such as "sh" and "ph" infuriated him, and silent letters made him grieve. If words were simply spelled the way they were pronounced, he argued, pretty much anyone who learned the alphabet could read, and that would virtually wipe out illiteracy

woman grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me over the chain. "It's all right," I told her. "My dad does stuff like this all the time." "He should be arrested!" she shouted. "Okay, kids

Everyone assumed I was a normal person, she said. It was weird.

My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.

Most important thing in life," he would say, "is learning how to fall." *

On our way back from the candy store, Brian and I liked to spy on the Green Lantern—a big dark green house with a sagging porch right near the highway. Mom said it was a cathouse, but I never saw any cats there, only women wearing bathing suits or short dresses who sat or lay out on the porch, waving at the cars that drove by. There were Christmas lights over the door all year round, and Mom said that was how you could tell it was a cathouse.

You know you're down and out when the Okies laugh at you.

She paused for a moment. "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.

The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them.

The scar meant that I was stronger than what had tried to hurt me.

had all thirteen families in Horse Mesa register to vote, and on election day, Jim drove me into Tortilla Flats. I kept the ballots in one hand and my pearl-handled revolver in the other, daring anyone to try to hijack democracy by stealing the twenty-six votes I had been entrusted with. "Hold on, everyone!" I declared when I arrived. "The votes from Horse Mesa are here, and I'm proud to announce we had one hundred percent turnout.

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water. "Ghoti," he liked to point out, could be pronounced like "fish." The "gh" had the "f" sound in "enough," the "o" had the short "i" sound in "women," and "ti" had the "sh" sound in "nation." Dad

That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: They love the freighter people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.

We stopped under a railroad bridge and got out of the car to admire the river that ran through the town.