Jeannette Walls Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.

Jeannette Walls
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.

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
Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

Jeannette Walls
Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that 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
She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak.

Jeannette Walls
You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.

Jeannette Walls
God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.

Jeannette Walls
The fact is, you don't love me, and you haven't destroyed me. You don't have what it takes to do that.

Jeannette Walls
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Clause myth and got nothing 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
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
Whoever coined the phrase 'a man's got to play the hand that was dealt him' was most certainly one piss-poor bluffer.

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 dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react

Jeannette Walls
She never felt sorry for herself, and that was something I decided I admired most in people.

Jeannette Walls
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 a good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.

Jeannette Walls
Unlike diamonds, watches were practical. They were for people on the run, people with appointments to keep and schedules to meet.

Jeannette Walls
When someone's wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.

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
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
Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.

Jeannette Walls
Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear.

Jeannette Walls
The negative thoughts seemed to swoop into her mind the way a big flock of black crows takes over the landscape, sitting thick in the trees and on the fence rails and lawns, staring at you in ominous silence.

Jeannette Walls