Top 160 Jeannette Walls Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He never said anything, but I think he figured that, as when we were kids, we both stood a better chance if we took on the world together.”

— Jeannette Walls

102. “There was nothing to compare with standing on a ice of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it.”

— Jeannette Walls

103. “It’s not being prejudiced,” Mom said. “It’s a matter of accuracy in labeling.”

— Jeannette Walls

104. “I always wanted to be a serious journalist.”

— Jeannette Walls

105. “I think you’d make a wonderful teacher. You have a strong personality. The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers.”

— Jeannette Walls

106. “The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn’t find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads.”

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

108. “Crockett and James Bowie got what was coming to them,” Mom said, “for stealing this land from the Mexicans.”

— Jeannette Walls

109. “Everything in life is gray, you know.”

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

111. “What struck me most was his crooked grin, like he saw the world in his own special way and got a kick out of it.”

— Jeannette Walls

112. “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

113. “Sad state to spend your life in. Being afraid of your own self.” Rex Walls.”

— Jeannette Walls

114. “You know you’re down and out when the Okies laugh at you.”

— Jeannette Walls

115. “At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it ‘A Ghoti out of Water.’ “Ghoti,” he liked to point out, could be pronounced like “fish.” The “gh” had the “f” sound in “enough,” the “o” had the short “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” had the “sh” sound in “nation.”

— Jeannette Walls

116. “What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.”

— Jeannette Walls

117. “She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.”

— Jeannette Walls

118. “Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I’d be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom’s, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some.”

— Jeannette Walls

119. “I find books that have a moral and spiritual center, that speak to what is really important and lasting, hugely appealing.”

— Jeannette Walls

120. “He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids’ homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn’t count. Forty dollars a week was serious money.”

— Jeannette Walls

121. “She was keeping it, she explained, to replace the wedding ring her mother had given her, the Dad had pawned shortly after they got married. ‘But Mom,’ I said, ‘that ring could get us a lot of food.’ ‘That’s true,’ Mom said, ’but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food.”

— Jeannette Walls

122. “I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.”

— Jeannette Walls

123. “The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn’t have time to react.”

— Jeannette Walls

124. “She never felt sorry for herself, and that was something I decided I admired most in people.”

— Jeannette Walls

125. “The inconsistent spelling of words in the English language also vexed Dad to no end. Digraphs such as “sh” and “ph” infuriated him, and silent letters made him grieve. If words were simply spelled the way they were pronounced, he argued, pretty much anyone who learned the alphabet could read, and that would virtually wipe out illiteracy.”

— Jeannette Walls

126. “I found out that people are incredibly compassionate and kind. It really changed my view of the world.”

— Jeannette Walls

127. “Don’t be someone else’s little cheerleader”, Mom said. “Be the star of your own show. Even if there’s no audience.”

— Jeannette Walls

128. “Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who’d saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel.”

— Jeannette Walls

129. “I was so worried that people wouldn’t like me or my story.”

— Jeannette Walls

130. “Whenever I’m reading a book I enjoy, I always develop a mental list of the people I want to share it with.”

— Jeannette Walls

131. “What turns to stone is inside you.”

— Jeannette Walls

132. “My life is not just about the past.”

— Jeannette Walls

133. “Ironing was a particularly galling waste of time. You’d spend twenty minutes pressing one shirt front and back, spraying starch and getting the creases sharp, but once the man of the house put it on, it would wrinkle as soon as he bent an elbow; plus, you couldn’t even see whether the danged shirt was ironed or not under his suit coat.”

— Jeannette Walls

134. “There was no better way to read a man’s character than to watch him play poker. Some played with the aim of holding on to what they had, others played to make a killing. For some it was gambling pure and simple, for others it was a game of skill involving small calculated risks. For some it was about numbers, for others it was about psychology.”

— Jeannette Walls

135. “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

136. “We’re becoming a nation of sissies.”

— Jeannette Walls

137. “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

138. “The scar meant that I was stronger than what had tried to hurt me.”

— Jeannette Walls

139. “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

140. “She kept saying that the flood was God’s will and we had to submit to it. But I didn’t see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail – the gumption to try to save ourselves – isn’t that what he wanted us to do?”

— Jeannette Walls

141. “The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white and the blue lights boldly growing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the inmense darkness of the range.”

— Jeannette Walls

142. “We raised our glasses. I could almost hear Dad chuckling at Mom’s comment in the way he always did when he was truly enjoying something. It had grown dark outside. A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order.”

— Jeannette Walls

143. “She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed.”

— Jeannette Walls

144. “Rich city folks, he’d say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted that they couldn’t even see the stars.”

— Jeannette Walls

145. “Elvis Presley’s death was a turning point in news coverage;.”

— Jeannette Walls

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

— Jeannette Walls

147. “Horses are a mirror of who you are. They’re emotionally dependent on you.”

— Jeannette Walls

148. “You busted your snot locker pretty good.”

— Jeannette Walls

149. “From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.”

— Jeannette Walls

150. “My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.”

— Jeannette Walls