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...
If you want to be treated like a mother, I said, you should act like one.
I told Mom that maybe I had made a terrible mistake, but mom said sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better.
I never met a kid I couldn't teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let yo...
I never believed in Santa Claus. None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn't afford expensive presents and they didn't want us to think we weren't as good as other kids who, on C...
I felt there was a lot I needed to teach her. I wanted to give her an early grounding in the basics of arithmetic and reading, but even more important, I wanted to get across the idea that the world w...
God knows what He’s doing,
But the positive thoughts would give away 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 th...
But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.
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 s...
Everyone who is interesting has a past
You can't live in fear of something as basic as fire.
You West Virginia girls are one tough breed, he said.You got that right, I told him.
Whoever coined the phrase 'a man's got to play the hand that was dealt him' was most certainly one piss-poor bluffer.
When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skill...
What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.
There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece 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.
Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was k...
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 t...
Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting o...