Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are
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.
If you get down, all you need to do is act like you're feeling good, and next thing you know, you are.
If I owned hell and west Texas, he said, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell.
I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman havin...
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 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 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...
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...
Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito.
And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.
We should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us.
Spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,
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...
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...
The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react