Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
18 quotes
"God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us."
"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?"
"Most important thing in life is learning how to fall."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one."
"Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out."
"Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels."
"Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"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."