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21 " She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe. "
― Jeannette Walls , Half Broke Horses
22 " Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he'd played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over? "
23 " As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else. "
24 " I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else. "
25 " Teaching is a calling too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy - angels leading their flocks out of the darkness. "
26 " Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life. "
27 " sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it "
28 " But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant. "
29 " If I owned hell and west Texas, he said, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell. "
30 " It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day. "
31 " The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react "
32 " Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing. "
33 " What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard. "
34 " History gets written by the winners, he said, and when the crooks win, you get crooked history. "
35 " 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. "
36 " A lady's hair is her crowning glory "
37 " 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. "
38 " Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt. "
39 " If you get down, all you need to do is act like you're feeling good, and next thing you know, you are. "
40 " You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. "