The Glass Castle Quotes
"Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true" —Dylan Thomas, "Poem on His Birthday"
"I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster."
"To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City."
"I was still rattled from seeing Mom, the unexpectedness of coming across her, the sight of her rooting happily through the Dumpster."
"I put some Vivaldi on, hoping the music would settle me down."
"You want to help me change my life? I’m fine. You’re the one who needs help. Your values are all confused."
"‘Just tell the truth,’ Mom said. ‘That’s simple enough.’"
"It’s my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew."
"Mom ran into the room. ‘Mommy, help me!’ I shrieked."
"I screamed. I smelled the burning and heard a horrible crackling as the fire singed my hair and eyelashes."
"The hospital was clean and shiny. Everything was white—the walls and sheets and nurses’ uniforms—or silver—the beds and trays and medical instruments."
"That was the thing about the hospital. You never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum."
"‘You flea-bitten drunk!’ Grandma would scream. ‘You goddamned flint-faced hag!’ Dad would shout back."
"‘What makes you think I’d accept your proposal?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t propose to you,’ Dad said. ‘I told you I was going to marry you.’"
"It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty."
"Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour, when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?"
"If the beans started going bad, we’d just put extra spice in them."
"We bought so much food that we never had much money come payday."
"After dinner, the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read."
"Mom believed that children shouldn’t be burdened with a lot of rules and restrictions."
"People should get things like that out of their systems when they were young."
"Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order."
"If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim."
"It’s a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven’t figured ’em out yet."
"The only rule was that we had to come home when the streetlights went on."
"Life’s too short to worry about what other people think. Anyway, they should accept us for who we are."
"You have to show compassion for her. She’s just an old woman who’s had a tough life."
"Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more."
"It’s good we raised you young ’uns to be tough. Because this is not a house for the faint of heart."
"Count your blessings. There are people in Ethiopia who would kill for a place like this."
"We might as well have been traveling in a Conestoga wagon."
"I’d rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than with trashy lawn ornaments."
"Insufficient information to draw a conclusion."
"What doesn't kill you will make you stronger."
"Real estate's about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location."
"We may not have insulation, but we have each other."
"I'm doing the best I can under the circumstances."
"Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around."
"We all read, but I never had the feeling of togetherness I’d had in Battle Mountain when we all sat around in the depot with our books."
"I can't leave your father. It's against the Catholic faith."
"I'd do it myself, except I can’t do diddly with my left hand."
"It's not so bad, but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet."
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet."
"You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you’d do just fine."
"Being a strong woman was harder than I had thought."
"Once you’d resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all."
"I’m not upset because I’ll miss you, I’m upset because you get to go to New York and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair."
"I’ve always believed in the value of a good education."
"Since when is it wrong for a father to take care of his little girl?"
"Other folks were also moving into abandoned buildings, she said. They were called squatters, and the buildings were called squats. 'Your father and I are pioneers,' Mom said. 'Just like my great-great-grandfather, who helped tame the Wild West.'"
"Mom explained that Dad had hooked up every squat in the building to an insulated cable he’d hot-wired off a utility pole down the block. 'We’re all getting free juice, thanks to your father,' Mom said. 'No one in the building could survive without him.'"
"I looked around, and it hit me that if you replaced the electric heaters with a coal stove, this squat on the Lower East Side looked pretty much like the house on Little Hobart Street."
"'Hell,' he said. 'I don’t have to see my Mountain Goat grabbing a sheepskin to know she’s got her college degree.'"
"What I wanted to say was that I knew Eric would never try to steal my paycheck or throw me out the window, that I’d always been terrified I’d fall for a hard-drinking, hell-raising, charismatic scoundrel like you, Dad, but I’d wound up with a man who was exactly the opposite."
"I can’t believe you’re asking me this,' I said. 'I’ve never even seen that land.'"
"Dad couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, raising a son who’d grown up to become a member of the gestapo."
"Mom insisted Maureen had not actually been trying to kill her—she’d just become confused and upset, she said—but the wounds required stitches, and the police arrested Maureen."
"Mom chimed in that all the junk food Maureen ate had led to a chemical imbalance, and Brian started yelling at them all to shut the hell up or he’d arrest them."
"We hadn’t gotten together since Maureen’s arraignment. Something in all of us broke that day, and afterward, we no longer had the spirit for family gatherings."