Top 160 Jeannette Walls Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”

— Jeannette Walls

52. “I felt best when I was on the move, going someplace rather than being there.”

— Jeannette Walls

53. “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

54. “I began to feel like I was getting the whole story for the first time, that I was being handed the missing pieces to the puzzle, and the world was making a little more sense.”

— Jeannette Walls

55. “If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.”

— Jeannette Walls

56. “I’m not so sure,” Dad said. “Every damn thing in the universe can be broken down into smaller things, even atom, even protons, so theoretically speaking, I guess you had a winning case. A collection of things should be considered one thing. Unfortunately, theory don’t always carry the day.”

— Jeannette Walls

57. “I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”

— Jeannette Walls

58. “She had her addictions and one of them was reading.”

— Jeannette Walls

59. “I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?”

— Jeannette Walls

60. “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

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

— Jeannette Walls

62. “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.”

— Jeannette Walls

63. “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

64. “She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak.”

— Jeannette Walls

65. “Life there was hard and it made people hard.”

— Jeannette Walls

66. “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?”

— Jeannette Walls

67. “God deals us all different hands. How we play ’em is up to us.”

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

69. “Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori. “Did you see better?” I asked. “I wouldn’t say better,” Mom answered. “I’d say different.”

— Jeannette Walls

70. “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

71. “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.”

— Jeannette Walls

72. “Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius,” he said. “You take after your old man.”

— Jeannette Walls

73. “You can’t live in fear of something as basic as fire.”

— Jeannette Walls

74. “Interesting people always have a past.”

— Jeannette Walls

75. “New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.”

— Jeannette Walls

76. “One day we heard on the radio that a woman in the suburbs had seen a mountain lion behind her house and had called the police, who shot the animal. Dad got so angry he put his fist through a wall. “That mountain lion had as much right to his life as that sour old biddy does to hers,” he said. “You can’t kill something just because it’s wild.”

— Jeannette Walls

77. “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

78. “My older sister achieved her dream of being an artist. She’s an illustrator living in Manhattan.”

— Jeannette Walls

79. “As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.”

— Jeannette Walls

80. “Confidence doesn’t come from thinking you’re perfect or flawless. That’s arrogance. Confidence comes from appreciating the beauty of your texture.”

— Jeannette Walls

81. “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

82. “In this world, it’s not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.”

— Jeannette Walls

83. “She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of hers was reading.”

— Jeannette Walls

84. “During the sermon, the priest discussed the miracle of Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. “Virgin, my ass!” Dad shouted. “Mary was a sweet Jewish broad who got herself knocked up!”

— Jeannette Walls

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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.”

— Jeannette Walls

90. “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.”

— Jeannette Walls

91. “On our way back from the candy store, Brian and I liked to spy on the Green Lantern – a big dark green house with a sagging porch right near the highway. Mom said it was a cathouse, but I never saw any cats there, only women wearing bathing suits or short dresses who sat or lay out on the porch, waving at the cars that drove by. There were Christmas lights over the door all year round, and Mom said that was how you could tell it was a cathouse.”

— Jeannette Walls

92. “I’m a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I’m a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.”

— Jeannette Walls

93. “What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”

— Jeannette Walls

94. “Everyone has something good about them,” she 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.”

— Jeannette Walls

95. “We each needed to respect the religious practices of others, seeing as it was up to every human being to find his or her own way to heaven.”

— Jeannette Walls

96. “It’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.”

— Jeannette Walls

97. “I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.”

— Jeannette Walls

98. “I never had any question that my parents loved me. I had a real sense of self confidence.”

— Jeannette Walls

99. “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.”

— Jeannette Walls

100. “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.”

— Jeannette Walls