THE GLASS CASTLE - JEANNETTE WALLS

The Glass Castle - Pg 286

   I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own. and when I first showed him my scar, he said it was interesting. He used the word "textured." He said "smooth" was boring but "textured" was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt me.

The Glass Castle - Pg 279

   But despite all the hell-raising and destruction and chaos he had created in our lives, I could not imagine what my life would be like—what the world would be like—without him in it. As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.

The Glass Castle - Pg 276

   I just stood there looking from one distorted face to another, listening to this babble of enraged squabbling as the members of the Walls family gave vent to all their years of hurt and anger, each unloading his or her own accumulated grievances and blaming the others for allowing the most fragile one of us to break into pieces.

The Glass Castle - Pg 268

   "He treats me fine, Dad," I said. 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.

The Glass Castle - Pg 261

   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."

The Glass Castle - Pg 246

   People had been warning me for months about how rude New Yorkers were. It was true, I learned that night, that if you tried to stop them on the street, a lot of them kept on walking, shaking their heads; those who did stop didn't look at you at first. They gazed off down the block, their faces closed. But as soon as they realized you weren't trying to hustle them or panhandle money, they warmed right up. They looked you in the eye and gave you detailed instructions about how, to get to the Empire State Building, you went up nine blocks and made a right and cut across two blocks and so on. They even drew you maps. New Yorkers, I figured, just pretended to be unfriendly.

The Glass Castle - Pg 245

   I hoped when New Yorkers looked at me, they would see whatever it was that Dad saw.

The Glass Castle - Pg 241

   I wondered if he was remembering how he, too, had left Welch full of vinegar at age seventeen and just as convinced as I was now that he'd never return. I wondered if he was hoping that his favorite girl would come back, or if he was hoping that, unlike him, she would make it out for good.

The Glass Castle - Pg 240

   I hugged Dad. When our cheeks touched, and I breathed in his smell of tobacco, Vitalis, and whiskey, I realized he'd shaved for me.
   "If things don't work out, you can always come home," he said. "I'll be here for you. You know that, don't you?"
   "I know." I knew that in his way, he would be. I also knew I'd never be coming back.

The Glass Castle - Pg 223

   Lori was about as different as it was possible to be in Welch. While almost all the other kids wore jeans, Converse sneakers, and T-shirts, she showed up at school in army boots, a white dress with red polka dots, and a jean jacket with dark poetry she'd painted on the back. The other kids threw bars of soap at her, pushed one another into her path, and wrote graffiti about her on the bathroom walls. In return, she cursed them out in Latin.

The Glass Castle - Pg 210

   "Have I ever let you down?" Dad asked.
   I'd heard that question at least two hundred times, and I'd always answered it the way I knew he wanted me to, because I thought it was my faith in Dad that had kept him going all those years. I was about to tell him the truth for the first time, about to let him know that he'd let us all down plenty, but then I stopped... I gave him the twenty dollars.

The Glass Castle - Pg 168

   Francie Nolan's father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shiftless drunk, maybe I wasn't a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.

The Glass Castle - Pg 141

   I'd seen Dinitia smile a few times with genuine warmth, and it transformed her face. With a smile like that, she had to have some good in her, but I couldn't figure out how to get her to shine it my way.

The Glass Castle - Pg 134

   The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic look, like an old hand-tinted photograph.

The Glass Castle - Pg 122

   "Rose Mary, you're one hell of a woman," Dad said. Mom told him he was a stinking rotten drunk. "Yeah, but you love this old drunk, don't you?" Dad said. Mom at first said no, she didn't, but Dad kept asking her again and again, and when she finally said yes, the fight disappeared from both of them. Vanished as if it had never existed. Dad started laughing and hugging Mom, who was laughing and hugging him. It was as if they were so happy they hadn't killed each other that they had fallen in love all over again.

The Glass Castle - Pg 104

   Mom thought it was superficial to worry about how you looked. She said God thought the same way, so she'd go to church in torn or paint-splattered clothes. It was your inner spirit and not your outward appearance that mattered, she said, and come hymn time, she showed the whole congregation her spirit, belting out the words in such a powerful voice that people in the pews in front of us would turn around and stare.

The Glass Castle - Pg 97

   Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson's roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple.
   Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom.

The Glass Castle - Pg 96

   On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they'd seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns.

The Glass Castle - Pg 96

   "What's the matter?" I asked. Instead of answering, Lori ran outside. I followed her. She was standing in the parking lot, gazing in awe at the trees, the houses, and the office buildings behind them.
   "You see that tree over there?" she said, pointing at a sycamore about a hundred feet away. I nodded.
   "I can not only see that tree, I can see the individual leaves on it." She looked at me triumphantly. "Can you see them?"
   I nodded.
   She didn't seem to believe me. "The individual leaves? I mean, not just the branches but each little leaf?"
   I nodded. Lori looked at me and then burst into tears.