If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim
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 found the gas, he said. Now all's I need to do is find the brake.
God knows what He’s doing,
Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.
Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and...
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.
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...
Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito.
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,
Everyone who is interesting has a past
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.