Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
26 quotes
"One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. 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."
"New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly."
"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."
"Life there was hard and it made people hard."
"She had her addictions and one of them was reading."
"[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."
"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."
"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."
"People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul..."
"Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior."
"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."
"As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had."
"You'll never make a fortune working for the boss man"
"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."
"It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty."
"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"
"It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do."
"You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races."
"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."
"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."
"You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever."
"Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are"
"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."
"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."
"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."