People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...

— Jeannette Walls

She had her addictions and one of them was reading.

— Jeannette Walls

She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.

— Jeannette Walls

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

Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.

— Jeannette Walls

So they told us all about how other kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grown-ups claimed were made by little elves wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN JAPAN.

— Jeannette Walls

Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail-the gumption to try and save ourselves-isn't that what he wanted us to do?

— Jeannette Walls

That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.

— Jeannette Walls

The sound of thunder awake me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mother took Buster and Helen to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing water out the window. Mother came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop. "To heck with praying!" I shouted. "Bail, dammit, bail!" Mom look mortified. I could tell she thought I'd probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a little shocked at it myself, but with the water rising so fast, the situation was dire. We had lit the kerosene lamp, and we could see the walls of the dugout were beginning to sag inward. If Mom had pitched in and helped, there was a chance we might have been able to save the dugout - not a good chance, but a fighting chance. Apache and Lupe and I couldn't do it on our own, though, and when the ceiling started to cave, we grabbed Mom's walnut headboard and pulled it through the door just as the dugout collapsed in on itself, burying everything. Afterward, I was pretty aggravated with Mom. 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

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 intense darkness of the range.

— Jeannette Walls