The Glass Castle Quotes

“Dad led me over to his cot. A neat pile of books was stacked next to it. He said his bout with TB had set him to pondering about mortality and the nature of the cosmos. He’d been stone-cold sober since entering the hospital, and reading a lot more about chaos theory, particularly about the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at Los Alamos who had made a study of the transition between order and turbulence. Dad said he was damned if Feigenbaum didn’t make a persuasive case that turbulence was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed. “I’m not saying there’s a bearded old geezer named Yahweh up in the clouds deciding which football team is going to win the Super Bowl,” Dad said. “But if the physics — the quantum physics — suggests that God exists, I’m more than willing to entertain the notion.”

Dad showed me some of the calculations he’d been working on. He saw me looking at his trembling fingers and held them up. “Lack of liquor or fear of God — don’t know which is causing it,” he said. “Maybe both.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“She's the one married to Dad."
"That was her choice," I said. "She needs to be firmer, lay down the law for Dad instead of getting hysterical all the time. What Dad needs is a strong woman."
"A caryatid wouldn't be strong enough for Dad."
"What's that?"
"Pillars shaped like women," Lori said. "" The ones holding up those Greek temples with their heads. I was looking at a picture of some the other day, thinking, Those women have the second toughest job in the world.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Snot locker was the funniest name I’d ever heard for a nose.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I’d never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes;”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder and passed”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“not this lords-of-the-earth crap, trying to rule the entire goddamn planet, cutting down all the forests and killing every creature you couldn’t bring to heel.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“This rat was not just eating the sugar. He was bathing in it, wallowing in it, positively luxuriating in it, his flickering tail hanging over the side of the bowl, flinging sugar across the table.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Everyone assumed I was a normal person,” she said. “It was weird.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of them was reading.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Things usually work out in the end.
What if they don't?
That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”
― WALLS JEANNETTE, The Glass Castle

“I've got kites to fly and fish to fry.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle