294 Quotes by Jeannette Walls

Everyone assumed I was a normal person,” she said. “It was weird.

You’ll never make a fortune working for the boss man.

Everyone has something good about them,” she said. “You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.

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.

The reason Dad was having a tough time getting steady work – as he kept trying to tell us – was that the electricians’ union in Phoenix was corrupt. It was run by the mob, he said, which controlled all the construction projects in the city, so before he could get a decent job, he had to run organized crime out of town. That required a lot of undercover research, and the best place to gather information was at the bars the mobsters owned. So Dad started spending most of his time in those joints.

Mom waved at the crowd. “You know you’re down and out when Okies laugh at you,” she said. With our garbage-bag-taped window, our roped-down hood, and the art supplies tied to the roof, we’d out-Okied the Okies. The thought gave her a fit of the giggles.

That was the way man was meant to live, he’d say, in harmony with the wild, like the Indians, not this lords-of-the-earth crap, trying to rule the entire goddamn planet, cutting down all the forests and killing every creature you couldn’t bring to heel.

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

My advice to anyone is to figure out what you’re good at – what it is that you love doing the most in life – and figure out a way to make a living from it.