Jeannette Walls

Novelist

1960-04-21

Quotes by Jeannette Walls

• Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.

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• People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...

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• Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• [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.

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• 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.

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• One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.

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• She had her addictions and one of them was reading.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Life there was hard and it made people hard.

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• New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.

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• Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.

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• ...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.

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• In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.

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