Jeannette Walls Quotes

Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.
Jeannette Walls
You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.
Jeannette Walls
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.
Jeannette Walls
As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get 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 have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.
Jeannette Walls
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?
Jeannette Walls
She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.
Jeannette Walls
The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard- ice. Sometimes it was soft- snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless- clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible- vapor- floating up into the the sky like the soals of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water forgranted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.
Jeannette Walls
You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.
Jeannette Walls
If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.
Jeannette Walls
The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white and the blue lights boldly growing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the inmense darkness of the range.
Jeannette Walls
So they told us all about how other kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grown-ups claimed were made by little elves wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN JAPAN.
Jeannette Walls
Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.
Jeannette Walls
One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
Jeannette Walls
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
Jeannette Walls
Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people.
Jeannette Walls
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. "Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten," Dad said, "you'll still have your stars.
Jeannette Walls
Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.
Jeannette Walls
Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are
Jeannette Walls
You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.
Jeannette Walls
Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.
Jeannette Walls
It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.
Jeannette Walls
You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim
Jeannette Walls
If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.
Jeannette Walls
It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.
Jeannette Walls
You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them,” [Jeannette's mom] 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.
Jeannette Walls
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing.
Jeannette Walls
You can't prepare for everything life's going to throw at you. And you can't avoid danger. It's there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit around wringing your hands about it, you'll out on all the adventure.
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.
Jeannette Walls
When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.
Jeannette Walls
The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers. Teaching is a calling, too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy--angles leading their flocks out of the darkness.
Jeannette Walls
I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong.
Jeannette Walls
You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man
Jeannette Walls
As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.
Jeannette Walls
You should never hate anyone, not even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You had to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.
Jeannette Walls
It (the sun) didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.
Jeannette Walls
People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...
Jeannette Walls
Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
Jeannette Walls
No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.
Jeannette Walls
Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.
Jeannette Walls
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 that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.
Jeannette Walls
I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.
Jeannette Walls
[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.
Jeannette Walls
The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.
Jeannette Walls
She had her addictions and one of them was reading.
Jeannette Walls
One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.
Jeannette Walls
I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.
Jeannette Walls
Life there was hard and it made people hard.
Jeannette Walls
People are like animals. Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You go to recognize what's in her nature and accept it.
Jeannette Walls
That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frightenpeople, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.
Jeannette Walls
You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.
Jeannette Walls
New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.
Jeannette Walls
New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.
Jeannette Walls
Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.
Jeannette Walls
In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.
Jeannette Walls
...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it.
Jeannette Walls
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.
Jeannette Walls
Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of having a gimp leg. When he saw, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps towards us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank down on her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood.It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. "You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel," she said. "And thank me, too."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. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arms around my shoulders."There weren't no guardian angel, Dad," I said. I started explaining how I'd gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Well, darling," he said, "maybe the angel was you.
Jeannette Walls
The sound of thunder awake me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mother took Buster and Helen to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing water out the window. Mother came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop. "To heck with praying!" I shouted. "Bail, dammit, bail!"Mom look mortified. I could tell she thought I'd probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a little shocked at it myself, but with the water rising so fast, the situation was dire. We had lit the kerosene lamp, and we could see the walls of the dugout were beginning to sag inward. If Mom had pitched in and helped, there was a chance we might have been able to save the dugout - not a good chance, but a fighting chance. Apache and Lupe and I couldn't do it on our own, though, and when the ceiling started to cave, we grabbed Mom's walnut headboard and pulled it through the door just as the dugout collapsed in on itself, burying everything.Afterward, I was pretty aggravated with Mom. 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
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?
Jeannette Walls
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.
Jeannette Walls