You West Virginia girls are one tough breed, he said.You got that right, I told him.
What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.
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 sa...
The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse...
The place where you live - your home - is one of the most important things in a body's life.
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...
The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her...
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...
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.pg. 21
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 gumpti...
Poor old Venus didn't even make her own light, Dad said. She shone only from reflected light.
People say that when you return to the place where you grew up, it always seems smaller than you remember. ...but I don't know if it was because I had built it up in my memories or I had gotten bigger...
Most important thing in life, he would say, is learning how to fall. *
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.
Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I 'd have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on....
Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are
I’ve told you before, life’s not about doing what you want.
I’m not upset because I’ll miss you, Mom said. I’m upset because you get to go to New York and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair.
I’d rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than withtrashy lawn ornaments.
If you get down, all you need to do is act like you're feeling good, and next thing you know, you are.