294 Quotes by Jeannette Walls

Just remember,” Mom said after examining the blisters, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” “If that was true, I’d be Hercules by now,” Lori said.

When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, ‘The Maroon Wave,’ and that’s when I fell in love with journalism.

The road was called Agnes weeps, after the town’s first schoolteacher, who had burst into tears when she saw how plunging and twisting the road was and realized how remote the town must be. But from the first moment I laid eyes on it, I loved that road. I thought of it as a winding staircase taking me out of the traffic jams, news bulletins, bureaucrats, air-raid sirens and locked doors of city life. Jim said we should rename the road Lilly sings.

We’re becoming a nation of sissies.

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

You mean you own land worth a million dollars?” I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars?

The place where you live – your home – is one of the most important things in a body’s life.

Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. “It’s a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven’t figured ’em out yet,” he said. “You-all got a little too close to it today.

My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.