Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.
If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.
The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between D...
Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
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...
Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. Well, there you go, she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t, she said. So m...
Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of having a gimp leg. When he saw, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps towards us. Mom...
I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m.
If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.
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. Tha...
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, D...
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.
Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.
Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.
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...
Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.
Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was s...
That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frightenpeople, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.
I realized that you can get so 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 bi...
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...