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...
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 worry about what other people think,'' Mom said.''Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.
I’d rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than withtrashy lawn ornaments.
It was your inner spirit and not your outward appearance that mattered,
It (the sun) didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.
I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow co...
I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.
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.
As for the learning itself, I figured you didn't need a college degree to become on of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.
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 felt best when I was on the move, going someplace rather than being there.
I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. pg. 34
History gets written by the winners, he said, and when the crooks win, you get crooked history.
Everyone has something good about them, she said. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that. Oh yeah? I said. How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality? Hitler loved d...