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Top Jeannette Walls Quotes

Browse top 89 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jeannette Walls.

Favorite Jeannette Walls Quotes

1. "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
2. "Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more." ~ Jeannette Walls
3. "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." ~ Jeannette Walls
4. "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." ~ Jeannette Walls
5. "God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us." ~ Jeannette Walls
6. "Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I 'd have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. "A package that's been opened once doesn't have the same appeal"." ~ Jeannette Walls
7. "Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn't a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts." ~ Jeannette Walls
8. "Living there [Horse Mesa] was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs--those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms." ~ Jeannette Walls
9. "Every household needs one piece of furniture in really bad taste." ~ Jeannette Walls
10. "The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said the name was too Mexican."I thought we weren't supposed to be prejudiced," I said."It's not being prejudiced," Mom said. "It's a matter of accuracy in labeling." ~ Jeannette Walls
11. "Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all." ~ Jeannette Walls
12. "We're stronger than we realize." ~ Jeannette Walls
13. "I was in control of what people thought of me, but I had no control over what they thought of my mother. When I asked my mother, 'How do I tell people about you?' her answer was, 'Tell the truth'. But of course, the truth is never simple." ~ Jeannette Walls
14. "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." ~ Jeannette Walls
15. "One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice." ~ Jeannette Walls
16. "Things usually work out in the end.""What if they don't?""That just means you haven't come to the end yet." ~ Jeannette Walls
17. "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
18. "One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table." ~ Jeannette Walls
19. "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
20. "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
21. "Look at the way you live. You've sold out. Next thing I know you'll become a Republican." She shook her head. "Where are the values I raised you with?" ~ Jeannette Walls
22. "But I also hoped that [she] had chosen California because she thought that was her true home, the place where she really belonged, where it was always warm and you could dance in the rain, pick grapes right off the vines, and sleep outside at night under the stars." ~ Jeannette Walls
23. "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
24. "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
25. "You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races." ~ Jeannette Walls
26. "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
27. "She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak." ~ Jeannette Walls
28. "You West Virginia girls are one tough breed," he said.You got that right," I told him." ~ Jeannette Walls
29. "And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it." ~ Jeannette Walls
30. "[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." ~ Jeannette Walls
31. "It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day." ~ Jeannette Walls
32. "I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong." ~ Jeannette Walls
33. "The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react" ~ Jeannette Walls
34. "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
35. "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." ~ Jeannette Walls
36. "But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts, and 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
37. "Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear." ~ Jeannette Walls
38. "...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it." ~ Jeannette Walls
39. "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?" ~ Jeannette Walls
40. "I'm not upset because I'll miss you," Mom said. "I'm upset because you get to go to New York and I'm stuck here. It's not fair." ~ Jeannette Walls
41. "I was so worried that people wouldn't like me or my story." ~ Jeannette Walls
42. "My older sister achieved her dream of being an artist. She's an illustrator living in Manhattan." ~ Jeannette Walls
43. "I feel like 'Alice Through the Looking Glass.'" ~ Jeannette Walls
44. "I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m." ~ Jeannette Walls
45. "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
46. "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" ~ Jeannette Walls
47. "Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior." ~ Jeannette Walls
48. "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." ~ Jeannette Walls
49. "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
50. "New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly." ~ Jeannette Walls
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Today's Quote

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory."
Author: Chris Ware

What Did Jeannette Walls Talk About?

Hen
Thin
Said
She
Here
Ear
Wit
Hey
Use
Ring
Thou
Old
Ally
Though
Child
Ape
Sin
Per
King
Hand
Mad
Figure
Horse
Place
End
Ways
Star
Sit
Con
Seem
Act
Fall
Seemed
Ought
Tan
Win
Less
Kids
Kid
Children
Cause
Everyone
Pretty
Read
Son
Side
Came
Call
Ten
Might

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