Sam Reviews: "The Glass Castle: A Memoir" by Jeannette Walls

Amazing.  I figured this would be a good memoir with unique stories but boy what an understatement.  Even though this is written from one person's perspective, I truly felt empathy for each person and I cried for the last 20 pages of the book.  I don't know what more to say than, everyone should read this book.  I'm so grateful my dear friend Alley shared this with me and encouraged me to read it sooner rather than later.

"Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true." - Dylan Thomas, "Poem on His Birthday"

Interesting to note that the author capitalizes Dumpster when describing the scene of her mother going through it.

"I'd tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live."

"What could I do? I'd tried to help them countless times, but Dad would insist they didn't need anything,and Mom would ask for something silly, like a perfume atomizer or a membership in a health club. They said that they were living the way they wanted to."

Not to imply it isn't dangerous to allow a three year old to cook on a stove, but sometimes it's amazing what people can judge after a moment.  My mom always talks about how my brother knew how to cook macaroni and cheese for himself before he was 5 (may not have been 3 but younger than 5) and I never thought that was "wrong" or "inappropriate".  My brother never had a major accident, like burning the better part of his body, but things like that happen all the time, so I wonder how wrong it really is to let a child cook at an early age.

"Twenty-­three men had already proposed to her, Mom told Dad, and she had turned them all down.  'What makes you think I'd accept your proposal?' she asked.
"'I didn't propose to you,' Dad said. 'I told you I was going to marry you.'  Six months later, they got married.  I always thought it was the most romantic story I'd ever heard, but Mom didn't like it.  She didn't think it was romantic at all."

"Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said.  It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried."

"What I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire.  It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes."

"That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said:  They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.

"You'd be destroying what makes it special, it's the Joshua Tree's struggle that gives it its beauty."

"What could you expect, from an institution run by celibate men who wore dresses."  [in reference to Catholicism]

"Life's a drama full of tragedy and comedy.  You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more."

"Erma can't let go of her misery, it's all she knows."

"Maybe it's because life there was hard and it made people hard."

"Our trips reminded me how easy it was to pick up and move on when the urge struck.  Once you'd resolved to go there was nothing to it at all."

"It seemed to make him feel like he was doing what a father should, plucking up his daughter's courage, helping her face the terrors of the unknown."

"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."

"We both stood a better chance if we took on the world together."

"I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want."

"She looked across the table and smiled at me with the smile you give people when you know you have the answers to all their questions."

"They'd stumbled on an entire community of people like themselves, people who lived unruly lives battling authority and who liked it that way.  After all those years of roaming, they'd found home."

Sam Reviews "A Bend in the Road" by Nicholas Sparks

I'm not sure if age has jaded me or if one author can only write so many breathtaking romance novels but, to me, this was a miss.  I didn't feel any type of way about the love between the main couple and so I didn't feel compelled to root for them through their conflicts.  Speaking of conflicts, every conflict in this book - especially the most important one - seemed far too quickly resolved.  I struggled to be interested in this book even after the initial scene setting and character introductions.  I'm sure I will read other Nicholas Sparks novels but I will not be re-reading this one.

"There was an innocent ring to [her laugh], the kind he associated with children who had yet to realize that the world wasn't simply fun and games."

"Staring at her, he couldn't help but imagine that her words were either an invitation or a promise."

"Charlie suspected that I'd been trying to say that I was sorry [by covering her body with a blanket], and looking back, I think that was part of it.  But the other part was that I simply didn't want anyone to see her the way that I had.  So I covered her up, as if covering my own sin."

"There is a path one takes when moving toward destruction."

"I don't want to be a grown-up.  Grown-ups always say things are complicated."

Sam Reviews "The Pepsi Signs" by James Hansen

I struggled with this book.  The plot was interesting but I find the writing style tiresome. Also there was a lot of redundant descriptions and repeating chunks of monologue.  There were many unexpected twists and turns and moments of high intrigue but I think this particular genre isn't for me.

"Their conversation was not heated but I could tell there were mixed emotions banging back and forth.  Impatience has a certain tinge to it."

"God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason."

"Like any good idea, it was easy to understand."

"I know what it feels like to be in prison.  ...the feelings of a person who has lost the capacity to dream of escape, of freedom regained.  No hope at all of escape to freedom, no escape from the toil of another dreamless day where your every move is analyzed, scrutinized, and your daily routine determined by others."

"And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of the rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." - Saint Augustine

"The key to happiness and a fulfilled life was to have as strong and peaceful and just a soul as possible."

"Such fools men were, especially when it came to women who would never love them back."

"She cut him like a stiletto made out of glacial ice when she spoke."

"Ignore them until they disturb your own sense of peace and harmony or until you discover that they are more than [curse/swear] words but a true representation of one's philosophy of life at a bitter moment.  Then either turn the speaker around to a truer path or throw them out."

"Glaring at him with more contempt than any mere man could summon from the deepest, darkest part of his soul."

"People of no honor, no morals, and they Re drawn to you like flies to a dead body and you think this validates your existence and your worth."

"You chose your path and you can't allow yourself to get upset with how it has turned out because you can't unwind the spool of time and go backwards to fix it."

"No one argued with her much anymore because as far as she knew, she hadn't been wrong about anything, ever.  She could convince you that two plus two equaled five just by wearing you down."

"Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave."  -Prophet Muhammad

"The arguments were profound and loud as they tore the family apart."

"Nothing, absolutely not a fucking thing remains the same, even when it's perfect."

"I think I know you except of course for the well of information that every woman keeps hidden from a man."

"They said good-bye to their love affair, a sad moment for most, but not for them as the memories of their excitement and the purity of their days together would in the future help them overcome any negative wave that came their way."

"Those are the most dangerous kind [of women], those lonely ones."

"He truly only wanted to have a perfectly nice day out on the town with Laura so they would always have just that...in case their friendship would remain forever what it had been for the past ten years.  Let her take the subway home.  At least tomorrow, he would give her a first date that her next ten lovers would never match."

"He turned on his heel and walked away, never turning back to her for any kind of final look.  And she knew that if they turn around to look, they are truly interested in you."

"Chance favors the prepared mind."  - Louis Pasteur

"Michael knew he was a successful man by most standards, but he also carried with him the burden of believing that somewhere, somehow, greatness awaited him.  And he hungered for it, an escape from the ordinary."

"A bored girl is a dangerous girl."

"Show me a good woman and I'll show you a man who's tired of sleeping with her."

"Most people have as much brains as God gives a goose."

"I always believed that there are only solutions in life.  There aren't any problems worth worrying about.  If it's cancer, then you have to worry.  But not all the rest of the shit that clogs our minds every day, thwarting our progress, our pursuit of happiness.  Things you did in the past, things you didn't do.  Decisions you wish you could have another chance to make differently, what a waste of time.  You didn't take that job because you didn't have the nerve to try.  You didn't marry that young man or young lady because you didn't love him or her enough.  You didn't leave them sooner than you should have because you didn't want to take charge of your own life."

Sam Reviews "The Blood of Innocents" by Guy Reel, Marc Perrusquia, and Bartholomew Sullivan

So many years ago, probably around 2010 or 2013, my sister gifted me some true crime novels she thought I would be interested in.  They were added to my quickly growing pile of "To Be Read" books that I very clearly never got around to.  This book is actually about a notorious trial of The Memphis Three, a trial that found 3 teens guilty of murder with literally zero actual evidence.  This book was written in 1993, around the time when the sentence was actually applied.

I actually just recently found out about this case after falling down a rabbit hole about the Dixie Chicks conspiracy because one of the singers spoke out on behalf of the teens in 2001 or so.  So I did a Google search and realized this was actually a huge deal and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before.  There are three movies called Paradise Lost (with various subtitles) which were released in 1993, 2001, and 2012 respectively.

Reading this book after watching all three movies is interesting.  Not only because I know how the story "ends" if you will, but also just the time shock, which is only further proven by statements such as, "Under Arkansas law, Luminol test results are not admissible in court because they are considered unreliable, suggestive, and highly prejudicial."  A lot of reviews on Goodreads rate this book as 1 Star simply because of it's bias.  Upon finishing the book, I don't know where people got the idea that there was a bias at all.  I feel that this book was far more in depth that the "Paradise Lost" documentary, and it had accounts for many more people, which only went to show how confusing this case was and how insubstantial the evidence was.

For a true crime novel, I actually found this one more enjoyable to read than most.  Of course, it's strange reading a book that is 20 years old about a case that has already been revisited and resolved, but regardless I'm glad I got this additional point of view on the case.  Since I'm prone to falling down rabbit holes, I will also be trying to find interviews on YouTube and will be watching the film "The Devil's Knot" soon enough, and hopefully I'll find a way to watch "West of Memphis" soon, too.

Sam Reviews: "Courage my Love" by Merle Shain

"Psychoanalysts believe that if a baby has a good relationship with the breast he grows up to feel gratitude and learns to love.  But if the breast eludes him as often as it gives succor and relief, he feels anger and fear and learns envy and guilt and hate."

"If he ends up having to beg for what he needs, he learns more than just not to love, he learns to fear needing love, and to resent anyone who has that power over him."

"You can look the country over, searching for someone who sees the person you want to believe you are, but in the end, if you don't give yourself approval they won't be able to do much anything for you, no matter how much you try."

"The world was always yours, you would not take it.  Reach out your hand to yourself and it is yours."  -Archibald MacLeish

"You want to be in love all the time.  It's not possible to have romance every day in a longstanding relationship.  I can give you contentment and loyalty and enough security so you can grow.  But I can't give you excitement, I can't promise to admire you each and every day.  And while we would have, I hope, little renaissances along the way, there would not be that beating heart excitement which you seem to crave."

"Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions.  It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, abd allows them to change and to grow.  It seeks to honor, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse."

"In that world we all seek, that world of gifts given and gifts received, that world where there is goodness of fit, where there is always someone to catch our fall, the name of trust goes hand in hand with love."

"Respect is love in plain clothes, someone once said, and so is acceptance and understanding and really being known."

"There are people who idealize others as a way of solacing themselves, and others who keep you on a treadmill, auditioning for their approval, but always seem to keep the approval strangely in reserve.  And there are people who seem to always be in crisis, but it's hard to find a person who gives as good as they get or one who loves you for yourself."

"Intimacy requires accommodation and gentleness at the core."

"There is no intimacy unless there is mutual acceptance and mutual trust, no matter whatever else there is."

"One can make deals, or one can make love.  A deal asks back and love gives away and a contract has to be paid.  But love never comes due, because once given away, it always comes back to you."

"There was a time when we needed each other for support, both financial and domestic, but each sex can those things pretty well for themselves today.  Emotional support is the only thing we really need each other for now.  And if we aren't able to do that for each other, there won't be any reason to be together at all."

"Many of us have been sidelined bht violations so commonplace we can hardly find a friend to listen to us when we need to vent."

"The contract between men and women is entirely different now.  Nobody promises to love, honor, and obey any more.  At best, they promise to give it their best shot.  In a society in which fear of commitment has reached epidemic proportions, marriage is considered the last of the romantic gestures.  A triumph of hope over experience, and most people prefer to live together making bargains rather than promises."

"I don't want to be patient anymore.  And I don't want to be impatient either.  I want to be treated fairly.  And I don't want any more points for denying my needs."

Sam Reviews: "Hearts That We Broke Long Ago" by Merle Shain

"For my son - should he ever wonder if I loved him enough and my father who I never got to tell how much I did."

"Why, if she wished to drown herself, she was torturing herself with shallow waters."

"Whether the melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, it's the melon that suffers."

"Some of us hurl ourselves at life, and others crouch and wait for it to roll up over us, but you can usually tell who it is who is taking on life and who it is who is fending it off and whether this is a new game or whether it is old."

"The first person she ever loved was her father whom she could never please, and this man she was trying so hard to won, the one with the iron band locked around his heart, was just a substitute for him, someone with whom she could plat at trying to please her father still."

"It has been said that women of our generation 'grew up to be the men they always wanted to marry'."

"I am a part of all that I have met, and so, my friend, are you, and most of hd would have skipped a chapter here and there if we were the ones to choose.  But in the end it doesn't matter how what happened to you made you what you are today, only if you want to be there, and if it feeds you enough for you to stay."

"The girl who can't dance says the band can't play."

"No one is cheated in this world, unless it's by himself."

"When you want to, there are many ways to give hostages fortune, many ways to be sucked like a firefly to the flame, so those who fear abandonment find someone new to abandon them over and over again, and those who feel unworthy ask to be humbled, and the world always answers their prayers."

"According to [Hasidic Jews], on Judgement Day, each person will be invited to hang from the Tree of Sorrows all of his own miseries, and that done, he will be given permission to walk around the tree and survey everyone else's miseries in order to select a set he likes better.  ...  'Take what you want,' said God, 'and pay for it.'"

"It doesn't matter if you are chained by a golden chain or an iron one if it holds you in a place that is doing you harm."

"All things are possible and nothing safe."

"No one goes forward who hasn't finished with the past, and those, who try to, keep coming out the same door they went in."

"Despair is anger with no place to go, pain that has gone deep inside and dug in deep."

"Fears fight wars, and conquer worlds, build temples and bank accounts, get married and raise kids, but those who fear are always planning their defenses and their retreat, never living life, just escaping, never loving, only weeping."

"The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect yourself from life.  It lies in learning how to strengthen yourself so you can let a bit more in."

"Why must I pretend to scorn in order to pity?  Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why must I be so ashamed if my strength, so proud of weakness?  Why must I live in a cage like a criminal, defying and hating, I who love peace and friendship? Why was I born without a skin?  O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or be touched."  Eugene O'Neill "The Great God Brown"

"Sometimes when a child doesn't get what he needs when he is small an anger develops deep within him because he feels unsupported, and hence frightened and alone.  And because the road between fear and hate is such a short one, many people travel over it without ever leaving home."

"We all need love, and want it, and fear to get it too.  Fear that if it comes, is to accept our need for it and give it power over us.  So many people spend their lives trying to dissuade themselves of their needs, and they ask for love in a thousand places and spit to windward when it answers their call."

"As long as you blame someone it makes the problem not yours but theirs, and allows you to keep it without taking responsibility for anything but pointing the finger.  Which means you give them responsibility for your life and paralyze yourself forever in a place you don't want to be."


"When you are continually seeking the privileged place of the favored child, you are trading off acceptance of yourself as you actually are for an idealized image of the person you wish you were, which means judging yourself by higher standards than you'd set for anyone else.  So you're always finding yourself wanting, always letting yourself down, and your overblown evo always lets you know."

"I can handle hurts of many kinds, the challenges galore.  It's kindness I have trouble with, and tenderness from someone I could love that always makes me cry.  I suppose the joy reminds."

"Unexpected emotions are a good way to figure out what hurts.  Tempers that flare about unimportant things, tears that appear at odd times when we don't expect them, tell us what we feel even when we aren't telling ourselves."

"Our North American culture, more than any other, thrusts independence on us at an early age, and needs for community and affection and dependence are sacrificed to the god of standing tall.  Which means that a lot of people who needed to be protected when they were small got pushed from the nest too soon and had to learn to lool after themselves.  But often what they learned to protect themselves from was their own needs, needs that were never wrong."


"Fear is not love.  Nor os love dependence, jealousy, possessiveness, domination, responsibility, duty, self-pity, or any of thr other things that conventionally pass for love."

"All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own, just as by our actions we create the world we live in, what we send into the world is out there to greet us on the morrow when we go out to see."


"Thank you for the gift of my life and for helping me develop the strength to be a giver.  I realize now that it is a privilege to be able to give."

"No one can have too many people in their life who love them, only not enough."

"Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope."

"To hope is to set yourself up for a possible loss, so many people deny their hopes and by so doing detach themselves from shat they want, not recognizing that hope is a forward scout on the path of time, and without it there is no tomorrow, there is not even much to be said for today."

"I don't know where we got the idea that it is an either/or situation, that it's freedom or commitment, personal growth or responsibility, and that if we choose commitment it will be our loss and not our gain.  Because one grows in commitment, one doesn't diminish.

Sam Reviews "When Lovers Are Friends" by Merle Shain

I'm not sure if the title is misleading, or if this author's philosophy is that all people we care about are "lovers" but not necessarily "sexual lovers".  This books is about friendship, not about relationships, but I still feel like there is a lot of great information and metaphors in this book.  I continue to be impressed by how powerful her words are while being so simply written and quick to read.

"For my friends whom I need not name as they know who they are and what they mean to me."

"Love is short, forgetting's long, and understanding takes longer still."

"Independence carried to the furthest extreme is just loneliness and death, nothing more than another defense, and there is no growth in it, only a safe harbour for a while."

"We are a society of winners where almost everybody feels himself a loser, where but i clothes and size of genitalia as well as make of car tell us who we are.  We are youth cult where everyone is made to feel old, a live cult where far too many feel unloved.  And because we set up life so it hurts, most of us hurt a lot."

"Perhaps it's because we are all so desperate for love that we believe if ever it comes to us we will be happy evermore, and when it comes along we pay with the self we had for the love we want."

"If you are you, and we are us, then who is it that's I?"

"Marriage has done terrible things to friendship in the name of love."

"The search for the perfect other is always search for what we lack.  And the reason that we never find them is because the search goes on as long as we feel inadequate ourselves."

"We all have defenses we use more than wr need, and for everything they protect us from they cost us something more.  Defenses come in many forms, many more than I can name, and while some of them are more primitive than others, they all keep the world away from us just the same."

"As the story began to unfold it became clear that the man who he thought was championing his cause was really the problem and that without him it wouldn't exist.  The young man was up for promotion, which meant he would pass out of the older man's control, so the older man invented a problem that only he could solve.  He told the young man how much opposition there was to his appointment, how many people there were who didn't want him around.  And then when the young man was appointed, the older man took a lot of bows for managing the impossible.  And the young man felt grateful as well as dependent, so the older professor didn't have to worry about losing his control over him for a while."

"Getting control over others has a lot to do with making them feel weak.  You can make them feel indebted or make them feel inadequate in yet some other way."

"Many a person who kept another from growing up and away then found they had to carry that person for the rest of their days."

"We often fear being rejected so very much that we reject ourselves first before anyone else has the chance."

"Some people don't have to wait for others to accept them but accept themselves first, while others - no matter how much love they get - stand begging forever at a door they themselves have closed."

"If you must seek approval, choose the right audience to seek it from, and if you don't like what you hear get another opinion, get two or three.  And when someone wants you to be what you aren't or refuses you permission to be who you are, try to understand that is their problem, really, and you don't have to make it yours.  And don't let anyone tell you you have to be perfect to be loved, because that simply isn't true.  If the people in your life only love you if you put on a false front, they don't love you at all, so you haven't much to lose."

"Some people let others define them because they need their approval so much they are willing to let them call the shots, and others do it because they are so lacking in self-worth they are afraid that if anyone found out who they really were they would be rejected out of hand.  But if being honest means that occasionally you give yourself away by acknowledging limitations in yourself that someone might have missed before, well, that's only as bad as you consider it to be."

"There is something terrifying about learning that someone you'd always felt to be much more courageous than yourself has given up the fight."

"It is much easier to be courageous when people are applauding you than when you are in defeat.  And many of us who pass as brave when a crowd is all waving hats would crumble if they turned on us and started throwing rocks."

"A girl I know has been married since she was very young to a man she has loved since she was a child, and she has a life that in almost every way is story-book perfect and unblemished by hurt of any kind.  But she isn't half as strong within herself as other friends of mine who have had some bad days mixed in with the good.  And although I have heard others say they envy her and that they wish their lives had been so blessed, the fact is that she is very insecure at times, and as the years go by she worries more and more about how she would survive if her husband wasn't by her side."

"A lot of people get confused when they listen to a friend about what the purpose of that listening is, and feel they should do something to help out.  So they either take their friend's life away from them or, trying so hard to pull them from the hole they're in, fall inside themselves."

"There seem to be three main streams to life - the emotional, the sensual, and the rational - and all of us are made up of all these three, although in differing amounts.  ...  I don't know how we become lopsided or what causes one skein in the braid to become thicker than the rest - whether we back away from what we are afraid of, or go with the part of us that functions best.  I only know that most people grow more in one way than in others, and the side of them which is the most developed, determines their life.  And because this is the case, the side of them which is the most developed also dictates the kind of friend they make."

"It takes a long time to understand that there is no relationship which is all-supporting, only those which help you grow stronger in yourself.  So a lot of people never realize how important it is to have real friends or how crucial they can be even if you have a mate."

"I wish that men understood better the value of friendship as women are coming to know it now, because too often they still see other people as things to be conquered or held off.  Men have allies and they have enemies, but only a few of them really have friends."

"We are an achievement-oriented society, so a lot of men put their energy into getting ahead and being a success, postponing closeness with other human beings as if it were a luxury they couldn't afford just yet, and they complain a lot about all the work there is to do as if the priorities were set by someone else.  And many of them think of fulfillment as something to be found in money, wealth, success, and applause and don't learn until it's too late that the only wealth that really counts is having loving friends."

"I don't think you could have done me much more harm if you had hated me.  How odd that you should think of that as love."

"You don't get from friends what you give to them, you get what they have to give."

"You will save yourself a lot of grief if you keep in mind that you don't have you for a friend, however much you might wish you did.  You have that person out there instead.  Perhaps you will take chicken soup to a friend who is sick, and they will forget your birthday just the same.  Or maybe you will have them to your parties and they will give none to which you might be asked.  But maybe they will hand you a piece of truth one day, in a sentence tossed off with a sidelong glance, and if it's something you couldn't have found inside yourself, you will have been repaid in full."

"Life doesn't consist of total people.  It consists of moments, moments which are gifts that you can pick up and hang like pearls around your neck, but no one will hand them to you.  You have to supply the string in order to hug them to yourself."

"We are all essentially alone, and sometimes the people whom you love can make it through, and sometimes they can't get to you no matter how much they try."

"The people in one's life are like the pillars on one's porch you see life through.  And sometimes they hold you up, and sometimes they lean on you, and sometimes it is just enough to know they're standing by."