Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When we’d run through those, I went on to presidents and state capitals, then word definitions, word rhymes, and whatever else I could come up with, snapping at them if their voices faltered, and that was how I kept Helen and Buster awake through the night. • • • By first light, you could see that the water still covered the ground. In most places, a flash flood drained away after a couple of hours, but the pasture was in bottomland near the river, and sometimes the water remained for days. But it had stopped moving and had begun seeping down through the sinkholes and mudflats. “We made it,” I said. I figured it would be safe to wade through the water, so we scrambled out of the cottonwood tree. We were so stiff from holding on all night that our joints could scarcely move, and the mud kept sucking at our shoes, but we got to dry land as the sun was coming up and climbed the hill to the house just the way I had seen it. Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of his gimp leg. When he saw us, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps toward us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank to her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood. It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. “You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel,” she said. “And you thank me, too.” Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who’d saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad,” I said. I started explaining how I’d gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them. Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Well, darling,” he said, “maybe the angel was you.” Continue Reading… [image "Half Broke Horses Cover" file=Image00016.jpg] Half Broke Horses Jeannette Walls [image "images" file=Image00017.jpg] JEANNETTE WALLS was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the Southwest and in Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her award-winning memoir, The Glass Castle, is an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Walls is also the author of Half Broke Horses , a novel about her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  supposed to go to a senior. Only a handful of students wanted to work for the Wave, and I ended up writing so many of the articles that I abolished bylines; it looked a little ridiculous having my name appear four times on the front page. The paper cost fifteen cents, and I sold it myself, going from class to class and standing in the hallways, hawking it like a newsboy. Welch High had about twelve hundred students, but we sold only a couple hundred copies of the paper. I tried various schemes to boost the circulation: I held poetry competitions, added a fashion column, and wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the state Department of Education. Nothing worked. One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again: the school’s athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column called “Birthday Corner,” listing the names of the eighty or so people who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens wondered aloud if “Birthday Corner” represented serious journalism. I told her I didn’t care—it sold papers. • • • Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I’d been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad, about how he’d been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the time he was twenty- two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier in his X-1, even though the night before, he’d been up drinking and had been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs. Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a speech at Welch High and that he’d agreed to let me interview him afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘So now I will begin. I shall tell you the truth, so help me God. May I never taste wine or ale again if I deceive you. I have had, as I said, five husbands. Three of them were good, and two of them were bad. The three good ones were rich, and they were old. They were so old that they could hardly fulfil their duties. They could hardly rise to the occasion. You know what I mean. God help me, I can’t help laughing when I remember how hard they tried. God, did they sweat. I set no store by them in any case. Once they had given me their land and their fortune, I wasn’t bothered about the rest. I did not have to flatter or beguile them. ‘They loved me so much that I took their love for granted. That is the truth of it. A wise woman will be busy looking for a lover only when she hasn’t got one. But since I had them in the palm of my hand - and got all their money, too - why should I go to the trouble of pleasing them further? I could please myself instead. So I set them to work. Many nights they were exhausted and miserable. Were they unhappy with me? Well, let me put it like this. We would not have won many prizes for domestic bliss. Yet I got my way. I kept them sweet enough. They were always bringing me gifts from the local fair. And they were always happy when I spoke nicely to them. God alone knows that there were many times when I scolded them. Oh, did I nag them! Now, all you wives, listen to me carefully. Always be mistress in your household. If you need to, accuse your husbands of things they haven’t done. That is the way to behave towards men. I tell you this much. Women are much better at lying and cheating than men. I am not telling this to experienced wives. They have no need of my advice. I am talking to those who are having trouble. A wise wife, if she knows what she is doing, can swear that fire is water. If a little bird whispers in her husband’s ear, about something or other, she will call the little bird a liar. She will even get her maid to swear to her virtue. That’s the way to do it.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor. Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician—the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen. Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town—still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself. Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we’re all at a wedding. But you can’t just come out and say, We’re at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this. There was an old desert dog in a comic strip yesterday, sitting with his back against a cactus, writing a letter to his brother that said, “At night the sun goes down, and the stars come out; and then in the morning the sun comes up again. It’s so exciting to live in the desert.” That’s the wedding, right?

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Dad got ticked off and said that if I wasn’t going to team up with him, the least I could do was stake him some pool-shooting money. I found myself forking over a twenty, and then another in a few days. Mom had told me to expect a check in early July for the lease on her Texas land. She also warned me that Dad would try to get his hands on it. Dad actually waited at the foot of the hill for the mailman and took it from him on the day it arrived, but when the mailman told me what had happened, I ran down Little Hobart Street and caught Dad before he got into town. I told him Mom had wanted me to hide the check until she returned. “Let’s hide it together,” Dad said and suggested we stash it in the 1933 World Book Encyclopedia Mom got free from the library—under “currency.” The next day when I went to rehide the check, it was gone. Dad swore he had no idea what happened to it. I knew he was lying, but I also knew if I accused him, he’d deny it and there’d be a loud yelling match that wouldn’t do me any good. For the first time, I had a clear idea of what Mom was up against. Being a strong woman was harder than I had thought. Mom still had more than a month in Charleston; we were about to run out of grocery money; and my babysitting income wasn’t making up the difference. I had seen a help-wanted sign in the window of a jewelry store on McDowell Street called Becker’s Jewel Box. I put on a lot of makeup, my best dress—it was purple, with tiny white dots and a sash that tied in the back—and a pair of Mom’s high heels, since we wore the same size. Then I walked around the mountain to apply for the job. I pushed open the door, jangling the bells hanging overhead. Becker’s Jewel Box was a fancy store, the kind of place I never had occasion to go into, with a humming air conditioner and buzzing fluorescent lights. Locked glass display cases held rings and necklaces and brooches, and a few guitars and banjos hung on the pine-board-paneled walls to diversify the merchandise. Mr. Becker was leaning on the counter with his fingers interlocked. He had a stomach so big that his thin black belt reminded me of the equator circling the globe. I was afraid that Mr. Becker wouldn’t give me the job if he knew I was only thirteen, so I told him I was seventeen. He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids’ homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn’t count. Forty dollars a week was serious money. • • • I liked the work.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “You’ll grow to like it.” Part of the problem was that the other teachers and the principal, Miss Beatty, thought Mom was a terrible teacher. They’d stick their heads into her classroom and see the students playing tag and throwing erasers while Mom was up front, spinning like a top and letting pieces of chalk fly from her hands to demonstrate centrifugal force. Miss Beatty, who wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and had her hair done at the beauty parlor over in Winnemucca every week, told Mom she needed to discipline her students. Miss Beatty also told Mom to submit weekly lesson plans, keep her classroom tidy, and grade the homework promptly. But Mom was always getting confused and filling in the wrong dates on the lesson plans or losing the homework. Miss Beatty threatened to fire Mom, so Lori, Brian, and I started helping Mom with her schoolwork. I’d go to her classroom after school and clean her chalkboard, dust her erasers, and pick the paper up off the floor. At night Lori, Brian, and I went over her students’ homework and tests. Mom let us grade papers that had multiple-choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank answers—just about anything except essay questions, which she thought she had to evaluate because they could be answered correctly in all sorts of different ways. I liked grading homework. I liked knowing that I could do what grown-ups did for a living. Lori also helped Mom with her lesson plans. She’d make sure Mom filled them in accurately, and she’d correct Mom’s spelling and math. “Mom, double L s in Halloween,” Lori said, erasing Mom’s writing and penciling in the changes. “Double E s as well, and no silent E at the end.” Mom marveled at how brilliant Lori was. “Lori gets straight A s,” she once told me. “So do I,” I said. “Yes, but you have to work for them.” Mom was right, Lori was brilliant. I think helping Mom like that was one of Lori’s favorite things in the world. She wasn’t very athletic and didn’t like exploring as much as Brian and I did, but she loved anything having to do with pencil and paper. After Mom and Lori finished the lesson plans, they’d sit around the spool table, sketching each other and cutting out magazine photos of animals and landscapes and people with wrinkled faces and putting them in Mom’s folder of potential painting subjects. Lori understood Mom better than anyone. It didn’t bother her that when Miss Beatty showed up to observe Mom’s class, Mom started yelling at Lori to prove to Miss Beatty that she was capable of disciplining her students. One time Mom went so far as to order Lori up to the front of the class, where she gave her a whipping with a wooden paddle. “Were you acting up?” I asked Lori when I heard about the whipping. “No,” Lori said.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The father of Noah had two wives, didn’t he? I saw them in the pageant play. It made no difference to him. And what about Abraham? What about Jacob? They were old holies, weren’t they? And they had more than two wives. Plenty of these prophets did. Show me the passage where God forbids more than one marriage? Go on. Show me. You can’t. Where is the part of the Bible that commands virginity? There isn’t one. The apostle Paul says that he had no firm opinion on the matter. He may advise a woman to keep her virginity. That’s fair enough. But he cannot order her. He leaves it up to her. If God Himself had wanted us all to be virgins He would not have invented marriage, would he? If we were never allowed to mate, then where would the next generation of virgins come from? Not even Paul dared to touch a subject that his master left alone. If there’s a prize for virginity, I’m not going to compete for it. That’s for sure. And I bet there won’t be many runners. ‘Not everyone will agree with me, of course. There are some people who stay virgins because they believe that they are performing God’s will. Paul himself was a virgin, wasn’t he? He may have wished that everyone else would follow his example, but he was just stating an opinion. He did not forbid me from marrying. How could he? So it is no sin to marry me, once the old man is dead. It will not count as bigamy. Of course it is always dangerous for a man to touch a woman, in bed at least. It is like putting a flame to dry wood. You know what I mean. But that is as far as I will go. Paul said only that he preferred the virgin to the married couple. The virgin is stronger. ‘I grant you that. I have no quarrel with virgins. If they want to remain pure, in body and soul, I will not stop them. I can’t criticize and, in any case, I make no great claims for myself. But let me put it this way. Not all the vessels in a house are necessarily made of gold. The wooden ones are good for certain purposes. A man can put his lips to wood as well as gold. Although it may not glitter, it serves its function. God calls men and women to different vocations. All of us have different talents - some can do this, others can do that. I can do that. ‘I know that virginity is a form of perfection. Chastity is close to holiness. Christ Himself is perfection. But He did not tell people to surrender everything for the sake of the poor. He did not order them to give up their worldly goods and follow His footsteps. That was reserved for perfectionists, as I said. But, my lords, I am not one of those.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Valerius Maximus was a Roman author. Have you heard of him? He praises the nobility of Tullius Hostilius, who rose from poverty to become the third king of Rome. That Hostilius was a real gentleman. Seneca, and Boethius, both teach us that gentle natures are seen in gentle deeds. ‘And therefore, dear husband, I conclude as follows. Even if my ancestors were humble, I hope by the grace of God and by my own efforts to lead a virtuous life. When I choose virtue, and eschew sin, then I will be a gentlewoman. And do you blame me for my poverty? Did not the Saviour, the incarnate God, choose a poor life on earth? Every man, woman and child will surely know that Jesus, king of heaven, would not have made a bad or sinful choice. Seneca and other philosophers tell us that cheerful and willing poverty is a great blessing. Whoever is satisfied with a slender purse, even though he does not have a shirt on his back, I hold rich indeed. He who is greedy is wretched; he longs for that which he cannot have. He that has nothing, and wants nothing, is a man of wealth; you may call him a knave, but I call him a spiritual knight. Poverty sings. You may know that quotation from Juvenal, to the effect that the poor man whistles and dances before thieves. Poverty may seem hateful but it is in truth a blessing. It encourages hard work. It teaches the wise man patience. It teaches the patient man wisdom. It may seem miserable. It may be a state no one wishes. But it brings us closer to God. It brings us self-knowledge. Poverty is the eyeglass through which we see our true friends. So therefore, dear husband, cease your complaining. I have done you no harm. Do not rebuke me for my poverty. ‘But then you tell me that I am old. I don’t know whether it is taught in any learned books, but I always believed that gentlemen were meant to reverence old age. You call an old man “father”, do you not? I am sure that I could find many authors who say so. Why, then, do you call me “foul” and “ancient”? At least you will not be a cuckold. Age and ugliness are the best guardians of chastity in existence. Nevertheless I know that you have a good appetite. I will satisfy it as best I can. So choose now one of two things. You can have me old and ugly until I die, in which case I will be your humble and faithful wife obedient in everything. Or you can have me young and beautiful, in which case you can expect many visitors in the house; the crowd may flock to another warm place, too, but I leave that to your imagination. Which will it be? Choose now and forever hold your peace.’

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I was sure of it. Sort of. I began to stalk around his living room, like a trial lawyer making her case to the jury, explaining various aspects of the book, some of which, in my desire not to appear too obvious, I had forgotten to put down at all. I filled in lots of spaces, describing things that existed between the characters that I had assumed were clear. I was ranting—twenty-eight years old, savagely hung over, feeling like I was about to die—but I told him who the people were and what the story was. I sketched in the underpinnings of their lives and thought out loud how I could solve the bigger problems of plot and theme, how I could simplify some things and deepen others. I was not thinking about what I was going to say. Words were just pouring out of me, and when I was done, he looked at me, and said, “Thank you.” We sat side by side on his couch for a while, in silence. Finally he said, “Listen. I want you to write that book you just described to me. You haven’t done it here. Go off somewhere and write me a treatment, a plot treatment. Tell me chapter by chapter what you just told me in the last half hour, and I will get you the last of the advance.” And I did. I arranged to stay with some friends in Cambridge for a month, and there I sat down every day and wrote five hundred to a thousand words describing what was going on in each chapter. I discussed who the characters were turning out to be, where they’d been, what they were up to, and why. I quoted directly from the manuscript sometimes, using some of the best lines to instill confidence in both me and my editor, and I figured out, over and over, point A, where the chapter began, and point B, where it ended, and what needed to happen to get my people from A to B. And then how the B of the last chapter would lead organically into point A of the next chapter. The book moved along like the alphabet, like a vivid and continuous dream. The treatment was forty pages long. I mailed it from Cambridge, and flew home. It worked. My editor gave me the last of the advance, which I used to pay back my aunt and to buy time so I could write a final draft. This time I knew exactly what I was doing. I had a recipe. The book came out the following autumn and has been the most successful of my novels. Whenever I tell this story to my students, they want to see the actual manuscript of the plot treatment.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I pay through the nose for these moments, of course, with lots of torture and self-loathing and tedium, but when I am done for the day, I have something to show for it. When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids . Perhaps they are good role models: they thought they were working for God, so they worked with a sense of concentration and religious awe. (Also, my friend Carpenter tells me, they drank all day and took time off every few hours to oil each other. I believe that all my other writer friends do this, too, but they won’t let me in on it.) The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion—not to look around and say, “Look at yourselves, you idiots!,” but to say, “This is who we are.” In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.” And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along—your wounds. This is very painful. It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain. They got into it for the money and the fame. So they either quit, or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  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. • • • We pulled into the drive. Jessica, John’s fifteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage, came out of the house, along with Brian and his eight-year-old daughter, Veronica, and their bull mastiff, Charlie. Brian hadn’t seen much of Mom since Dad’s funeral, either. He hugged her and immediately started ribbing her about the plucked-from-the-Dumpster presents she’d brought for everyone in the shopping bags: rusting silverware, old books and magazines, a few pieces of fine bone china from the twenties with only minor chips. Brian had become a decorated sergeant detective, supervising a special unit that investigated organized crime. He and his wife had split up around the time Eric and I did, but he had consoled himself by buying and renovating a wreck of a town house in Brooklyn. He put in new wiring and plumbing, a new firebox, reinforced floor joists, and a new porch all on his own. It was the second time he’d taken on a true dump and restored it to perfection. Also, at least two women were after him to marry them. He was doing pretty darn well. We showed Mom and Lori the gardens, which were ready for winter. John and I had done all the work ourselves: raked the leaves and shredded them in the chipper, cut back the dead perennials and mulched the beds, shoveled compost onto the vegetable garden and tilled it, and dug up the dahlia bulbs and stored them in a bucket of sand in the basement. John had also split and stacked the wood from a dead maple we’d cut down, and climbed up on the roof to replace some rotted cedar shingles. Mom nodded at all our preparations; she’d always appreciated self-sufficiency. She admired the wisteria that wrapped around the potting shed, the trumpet vine on the arbor, and the big grove of bamboo in the back. When she saw the pool, an impulse seized her, and she ran out onto the green elastic cover to test its strength, Charlie the dog loping after her. The cover sagged beneath them, and she fell down, shrieking with laughter. John and Brian had to help pull her off as Brian’s daughter, Veronica—who hadn’t seen Mom since she was a toddler—stared wide-eyed. “Grandma Walls is different from your other grandma,” I told her. “Way different,” Veronica said. John’s daughter, Jessica, turned to me and said, “But she laughs just like you do.” • • • I showed Mom and Lori the house. I still went into the office in the city once a week, but this was where John and I lived and worked, our home—the first house I’d ever owned.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  But, all the time, he had never forgotten his fellow Israelites; and the day came when he decided to ally himself with the downtrodden children of Israel and say goodbye to the future of riches and royalty that he might have had. Moses gave up earthly glory for the sake of the people of God. Christ gave up his glory for the sake of all humanity, and accepted scourging and shame and a terrible death. Moses in his day and generation shared in the sufferings of Christ, choosing the loyalty that led to suffering rather than the comfort which led to earthly glory. He knew that the prizes of earth were contemptible compared with the ultimate reward of God. (3) The day came when Moses, because of his intervention on behalf of his people, had to leave Egypt and go to Midian (Exodus 2:14–22). Because of the order in which it comes, that must be what verse 27 refers to. Some people have found difficulty here, because the Exodus narrative says that it was because Moses feared Pharaoh that he fled to Midian (Exodus 2:14), while Hebrews says that he went out not fearing the blazing wrath of the king. There is no real contradiction. It is simply that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews saw even more deeply into the story. For Moses to go to Midian was not an act of fear; it was an act of courage. It showed the courage of the man who has learned to wait. The Stoics were wise; they held that people should not throw their lives away by needlessly provoking the wrath of a tyrant. Seneca wrote: ‘The wise man will never provoke the wrath of mighty men; nay, he will turn aside from it, in just the same way as sailors in sailing will not deliberately court the danger of the storm.’ At that moment, Moses might have gone on – but his people were not ready. If he had gone on recklessly, he would simply have thrown his life away, and the deliverance from Egypt might never have happened. He was big enough and brave enough to wait until God said: ‘Now is the hour.’ Moffatt quotes a saying of the biblical scholar A. S. Peake: ‘The courage to abandon work on which one’s heart is set and accept inaction cheerfully as the will of God is of the rarest and highest kind and can be created and sustained only by the clearest spiritual vision.’ When our natural instincts say: ‘Go on,’ it takes a big and a brave person to wait. It is human to be afraid of missing the chance; but it is important to wait for the time of God – even when it seems like throwing a chance away. (4) There came the day when Moses had to make all the arrangements for the first Passover. The account is in Exodus 12:12–48.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He sat down to help me draw up a list of intelligent questions so I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of this greatest of West Virginia’s native sons. What was going through your head when you first broke Mach I? What was going through your head when A. Scott Crossfield broke Mach II? What is your favorite aircraft? What are your thoughts on the feasibility of flying at the speed of light? Dad wrote up about twenty-five or thirty questions like that and then insisted we rehearse the interview. He pretended to be Chuck Yeager and gave me detailed answers to the questions he’d written out. His eyes got misty as he described what it was like to break the sound barrier. Then he decided I needed some solid grounding in aviation history, and he stayed up half the night briefing me, by the light of a kerosene lamp, on the test-flight program, basic aerodynamics, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. The next day Mr. Jack, the principal, introduced Chuck Yeager during assembly in the auditorium. He looked more like a cowboy than a West Virginian, with his horseman’s gait and his lean leathery face, but as soon as he started speaking, his voice was pure up-hollow. As he talked, the fidgety students settled into their folding chairs and became enraptured by the legendary, world-traveled man who told us how proud he was of his West Virginia roots, and how we, too, should be proud of those roots, roots we all shared; and how, regardless of where we came from, each and every one of us could and should follow our dreams, just as he had followed his. When he finished talking, the applause about shattered the glass in the windows. I climbed up on the stage before the students filed out. “Mr. Yeager,” I said, holding out my hand, “I’m Jeannette Walls with The Maroon Wave .” Chuck Yeager took my hand and grinned. “Jes’ spell my name right, ma’am,” he said, “so’s my kin’ll know who you’re writin’ about.” We sat down on some folding chairs and talked for nearly an hour. Mr. Yeager took every question seriously and acted like he had all the time in the world for me. When I mentioned various aircraft he’d flown, the aircraft Dad had briefed me about, he grinned again and said, “Heck, I do believe we got an aviation expert on our hands.” In the hallways afterward, the other kids kept coming up to tell me how lucky I was. “What was he really like?” they asked. “What did he say?” Everyone treated me with the deference accorded only to the school’s top athletes. Even the varsity quarterback caught my eye and nodded. I was the girl who had actually talked to Chuck Yeager. Dad was so eager to hear how the interview went that he was not only home when I got back from school, he was even sober.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The whole of our convent came out with me, with no bells and no noise at all, and we went into the chapel where we sang the Te Deum. Then I prayed to Christ, thanking Him for His revelation to me. Trust me, good wife and husband, when I tell you that the prayers of friars really do work. We know more about the teachings of Christ than any layperson, kings included. We live in poverty and abstinence. You lay folk indulge in luxury and spendthrift ways. You love meat and drink and all the foul temptations of the flesh. We friars, on the other hand, hold the world in contempt.’ The wife now left the room, in order to prepare the pig’s head for her guest. ‘Do you know the difference, Thomas,’ he went on in the same even tone, ‘between the poor man Lazar and the rich man Dives? One of them came to a bad end. Which one do you think it was? Those who wish to pray must fast and remain pure; they must curb the body and attend to the soul. We follow the teaching of the apostles. We are content with scraps of food and the merest rags. So our penance and our abstinence give wings to our prayers. They fly straight up to Christ in heaven.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  From time to time we all switched places so no one’s arms would wear out. The bark was chafing my thighs, and Helen’s, too, and when we needed to pee, we had to just wet ourselves. About halfway through the night, Helen’s voice started getting weak. “I can’t hold on any longer,” she said. “Yes, you can,” I told her. “You can because you have to.” We were going to make it, I told them. I knew we would make it because I could see it in my mind. I could see us walking up the hill to the house tomorrow morning, and I could see Mom and Dad running out. It would happen—but it was up to us to make it happen. To keep Helen and Buster from drifting off to sleep and falling out of the cottonwood, I grilled them on their multiplication tables. When we’d run through those, I went on to presidents and state capitals, then word definitions, word rhymes, and whatever else I could come up with, snapping at them if their voices faltered, and that was how I kept Helen and Buster awake through the night. • • • By first light, you could see that the water still covered the ground. In most places, a flash flood drained away after a couple of hours, but the pasture was in bottomland near the river, and sometimes the water remained for days. But it had stopped moving and had begun seeping down through the sinkholes and mudflats. “We made it,” I said. I figured it would be safe to wade through the water, so we scrambled out of the cottonwood tree. We were so stiff from holding on all night that our joints could scarcely move, and the mud kept sucking at our shoes, but we got to dry land as the sun was coming up and climbed the hill to the house just the way I had seen it. Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of his gimp leg. When he saw us, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps toward us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank to her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood. It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. “You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel,” she said. “And you thank me, too.” Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who’d saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor. Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician—the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen. Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town—still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself. Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we’re all at a wedding. But you can’t just come out and say, We’re at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this. There was an old desert dog in a comic strip yesterday, sitting with his back against a cactus, writing a letter to his brother that said, “At night the sun goes down, and the stars come out; and then in the morning the sun comes up again. It’s so exciting to live in the desert.” That’s the wedding, right?

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I grabbed the biggest rock I could find and hit one of the girls on the head with it. From the jolt in my arm, I thought I’d cracked her skull. She sank to her knees. One of her friends pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the face; then they all ran off, the girl I had hit holding her head as she staggered along. Brian and I sat up. His face was covered with sand. All I could see were his blue eyes peering out and a couple of spots of blood seeping through. I wanted to hug him, but that would have been too weird. Brian stood up and gestured for me to follow him. We climbed through a hole in the chain-link fence he had discovered that morning and ran into the iceberg-lettuce farm next to the apartment building. I followed him through the rows of big green leaves, and we eventually settled down to feast, burying our faces in the huge wet heads of lettuce and eating until our stomachs ached. “I guess we scared them off pretty good,” I said to Brian. “I guess,” he said. He never liked to brag, but I could tell he was proud that he had taken on four bigger, tougher kids, even if they were girls. “Lettuce war!” Brian shouted. He tossed a half-eaten head at me like a grenade. We ran along the rows, pulling up heads and throwing them at each other. A crop duster flew overhead. We waved as it made a pass above the field. A cloud sprayed out from behind the plane, and a fine white powder came sprinkling down on our heads. • • • Two months after we moved to Blythe, when Mom said she was twelve months pregnant, she at last gave birth. After she’d been in the hospital for two days, we all drove out to pick her up. Dad left us kids waiting in the car with the engine idling while he went in for Mom. They came running out with Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. Mom was cradling a bundle in her arms and giggling sort of guiltily, like she’d stolen a candy bar from a dime store. I figured they had checked out Rex Walls–style. “What is it?” Lori asked as we sped away. “Girl!” Mom said. Mom handed me the baby. I was going to turn six in a few months, and Mom said I was mature enough to hold her the entire way home. The baby was pink and wrinkly but absolutely beautiful, with big blue eyes, soft wisps of blond hair, and the tiniest fingernails I had ever seen. She moved in confused, jerky motions, as if she couldn’t understand why Mom’s belly wasn’t still around her. I promised her I’d always take care of her. The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad,” I said. I started explaining how I’d gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them. Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Well, darling,” he said, “maybe the angel was you.” Continue Reading… [image "Half Broke Horses Cover" file=Image00016.jpg] Half Broke Horses Jeannette Walls [image "images" file=Image00017.jpg] JEANNETTE WALLS was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the Southwest and in Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her award-winning memoir, The Glass Castle, is an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Walls is also the author of Half Broke Horses , a novel about her grandmother Lily Casey Smith. She is married to writer John Taylor and lives in Virginia. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS • MOTION PICTURE ARTWORK © 2017 LIONS GATE ENTERTAINMENT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Also by Jeannette Walls Half Broke Horses The Silver Star We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "Image" file=Image00018.jpg] SCRIBNER A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2005 by Jeannette Walls All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. This Scribner hardcover edition October 2009 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com . Designed by Kyoko Watanabe Library of Congress Control Number: 2004058907 ISBN 978-1-4391-5696-4 ISBN 978-1-4165-5060-0 (ebook)

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Tawny SHE HOLDS ON to Ed’s arm, feeling out of place. Not that she doesn’t recognize the faces gathered here. Most have been guests at dinner parties she’s arranged for the Countess. And isn’t she acting her part today, bringing the dogs to graduation! At least she’s brought along a dog walker. Handsome young man. She doesn’t recognize him. The Countess is full of surprises. Oh, Lord ... she’s introducing Phoebe to Abby! Well, that should be interesting. She doesn’t trust Abby. Ed thinks she’s crazy. You’re too suspicious, he tells her. The woman doesn’t have any ulterior motive. She’d like to know how he can be so sure. And now here comes Abby, waving at her as if they’re long-lost friends. At least Phoebe understands the rules. Lamb HOW PROUD HE IS of his daughter. He tears up as she marches in to “Pomp and Circumstance.” And that smile, as she accepts her diploma. Caitlin Mayhew Somers. He’s sure the audience is as awed by her charm and beauty as he is. He holds Abby’s hand tightly. Sharkey sits on his other side and next to him, Phoebe. Sharkey hadn’t sent her an invitation to his graduation from Choate. Two parents at graduation is enough, he’d said. And as far as he knows, Phoebe never noticed the snub. Now Phoebe leans across Sharkey and whispers something to him. He gets a whiff of her perfume, the same one that used to drive him crazy. He moves closer to Abby and smiles, letting her know it’s okay, he’s there for her. Then the headmaster calls, Victoria Leonard. Vix accepts her diploma plus a five-hundred-dollar award for academic excellence. The audience claps politely. Thank you very much, she says. I couldn’t have done this without my family’s support. She finds him and Abby in the audience, smiles, then looks over at her parents. Abby squeezes his hand, sniffles, and reaches for a tissue. Their summer daughter. How lucky they are.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Jeannette, I’m going to give you a sock that I want you to put in a safe place,” Mom said once she got in the car. She winked hard at me as she reached inside her bra and pulled out her other sock, knotted in the middle and bulging at the toe. “Hide it where no one can get it, because you know how scarce socks can get in our house.” “Goddammit, Rose Mary,” Dad snapped. “Do you think I’m a fucking idiot?” “What?” Mom asked, throwing her arms up in the air. “Am I not allowed to give my daughter a sock?” She winked at me again, just in case I didn’t get it. Back in Battle Mountain, Dad insisted we go to the Owl Club to celebrate payday, and ordered steaks for all of us. They tasted so good we forgot we were eating a week’s worth of groceries. “Hey, Mountain Goat,” Dad said at the end of the dinner, while Mom was putting our table scraps in her purse. “Why don’t you let me borrow that sock for a second?” I looked around the table. No one met my eye except Dad, who was grinning like an alligator. I handed over the sock. Mom gave a dramatic sigh of defeat and let her head drop down on the table. To show who was in charge, Dad left the waitress a ten-dollar tip, but on the way out, Mom slipped it into her purse. • • • Soon we were out of money again. When Dad dropped Brian and me off at school, he noticed that we weren’t carrying lunch bags. “Where are your lunches?” Dad asked us. We looked at each other and shrugged. “There’s no food in the house,” Brian said. When Dad heard that, he acted outraged, as though he’d learned for the first time that his children were going hungry. “Dammit, that Rose Mary keeps spending money on art supplies!” he muttered, pretending to be talking to himself. Then he declared more loudly, “No child of mine has to go hungry!” After he dropped us off, he called after us, “Don’t you kids worry about a thing.” At lunch Brian and I sat together in the cafeteria. I was pretending to help him with his homework so that no one would ask us why we weren’t eating when Dad appeared in the doorway, carrying a big grocery bag. I saw him scanning the room, looking for us. “My young ’uns forgot to take their lunch to school today,” he announced to the teacher on cafeteria duty as he walked toward us. He set the bag on the table in front of Brian and me and took out a loaf of bread, a whole package of bologna, a jar of mayonnaise, a half-gallon jug of orange juice, two apples, a jar of pickles, and two candy bars. “Have I ever let you down?” he asked Brian and me and then turned and walked away.