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. ...
If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.
You can't prepare for everything life's going to throw at you. And you can't avoid danger. It's there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit around wringing your hands about it, you'll out on all the adventure.
Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.
People are like animals. Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You go to recognize what's in her nature and accept it.
Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.
If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.
Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail- the gumption to try and save ourselves- isn't that what he wanted us to do?
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...
The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache'...
...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have...
In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.
God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.
Everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.
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.
Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.
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 p...
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 wantin...
