Jeannette Walls Quotes

’Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The Indians didn’t use pillows, either, he explained, and look how straight they stood. We did have our scratchy army-surplus blankets, so we spread them out and lay there, looking up at the field of stars. I told Lori how lucky we were to be sleeping out under the sky like Indians. ‘We could live like this forever,’ I said. ‘I think we’re going to,’ she said.”

“If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.”

“Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on.”

″‘Oh Yeah?’ I said. ‘How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?’ ‘Hitler loved dogs,’ Mom said without hesitation.”

“After dinner the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know...Occasionally, on those nights when we were all reading together, a train would thunder by, shaking the house and rattling the windows. The noise was thunderous, but after we’d been there a while, we didn’t even hear it.”

“Mom frowned at me. ‘You’d be destroying what makes it special’ she said, ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty’.”

“Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Right there. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You’re way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it.’ ‘And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?’ ‘Just tell the truth,’ Mom said. ‘That’s simple enough.‘”

“We’re not poor.”

“I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. 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. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”

“Situations like these, I realized, were what turned people into hypocrites.”

“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.‘”

“‘Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy,’ Mom told me. ‘You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.‘”

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

“And when I first showed him my scar, he said it was interesting. He used the word ‘textured’. He said ‘smooth’ is boring but ‘textured’ was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt me.”

“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”

″‘What the [heck],’ Dad said. ‘It’s Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.’ And he gave me Venus.”

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

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

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

“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.”