Quotes from Jeannette Walls

I'm none too big on giving advice,' Aunt Al said. 'Most times when folks ask for advice, they already know what they should do. They just want to hear it from someone else.

I'm not upset because I'll miss you," Mom said. "I'm upset because you get to go to New York and I'm stuck here. It's not fair.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

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.

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?

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.

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

She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed.

She knew how to get by on next to nothing.

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.

A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order.

Life's too short to worry about what other people think... Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.

There was nothing to compare with standing on a ice of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it.

It was your inner spirit and not your outward appearance that mattered

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.

Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel.

Life's too short to worry about what other people think,'' Mom said.''Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.

Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go", she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't", she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger then that", she went back to her crossword puzzle.

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.

It's not being prejudiced," Mom said. "It's a matter of accuracy in labeling.

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

I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes. • • •

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he'd played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?

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.