"The Glass Castle" [.]

The kids are (mostly) all right.

• "You strike me as the kind of girl who's one day going to be eating roast chicken and those on-fire desserts just as much as you want."
• "This house doesn't have a lick of insulation," Brian told Mom.. "All the heat's going right through the roof." <> "We may not have insulation," Mom said.. "but we have each other."
• "No, thank you. I've got kites to fly and fish to fry."
• Mom always bought the dented cans, even if they weren't marked down, because she said they needed to be loved, too.
• (Her homemade braces:) the coat hanger dug into the back of my skull, so I used a Kotex sanitary napkin for padding.
• I'd also used Magic Markers to make colored blotches on my legs that I hoped would camouflage the holes in my pants.
• I thought about her offer. "Take Lori instead of me," I said, "And at the end of the summer, buy her a bus ticket to New York City."
• Even the varsity quarterback caught my eye and nodded. I was the girl who had actually talked to Chuck Yeager.
• Dad's hands trembled slight as he unrolled different blueprints... in his precise, blocky handwriting.
• "Your daddy and I have moved to New York!" <> The first thing I thought about was the van that had broken down on the turnpike that morning. "It was on the radio."
• "We wash as far down as possible and as far up as possible, but we don't wash possible, " was how Mom put it.
• So, when I enrolled for my final year at Barnard, I paid what I owed on my tuition with Dad's wadded, crumpled bills.
• She told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard."

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