She kept saying that the flood was God’s will and we had to submit to it. But I didn’t see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail – the gumption to try to save ourselves – isn’t that what he wanted us to do?

— Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls Quotes

Phoenix was square and straight, boxy and boxed in, and above all, fake.

— Jeannette Walls

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.

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

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.

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.

— Jeannette Walls

Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius,” he said. “You take after your old man.

— Jeannette Walls

Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I’d be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom’s, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some.

— Jeannette Walls

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.

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

You mean you own land worth a million dollars?” I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars?

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.

— Jeannette Walls

I took a breath. “He’s developing a technology to.

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

Six months later, Maureen stabbed Mom.

— Jeannette Walls

Pleased to meet you, Grandma,’ I said.

— Jeannette Walls

Just remember,” Mom said after examining the blisters, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” “If that was true, I’d be Hercules by now,” Lori said.

— Jeannette Walls

She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of hers was reading.

— Jeannette Walls

I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?

— Jeannette Walls
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