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.
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
Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven, Aunt Al said. ‘For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.’
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.
If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim
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, b...
I found the gas, he said. Now all's I need to do is find the brake.
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.
Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is If you don’t want t...
But I also hoped that [she] had chosen California because she thought that was her true home, the place where she really belonged, where it was always warm and you could dance in the rain, pick grapes...
We should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us.
The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react
That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. All you have to do, Mountain Goat, is show old De...