The Glass Castle Homeless Quotes

Homeless is a very vague term. For some people it means living on the streets and scavenging for every meal. For others it means moving from place to place and never settling down. Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle, was in a similar situation and never settled in the same place as a child. Her dad is an alcoholic that can only keep a job for a short period of time and her mother stays at home and paints all day. Her mom and dad are very lenient parents and let their kids figure things out by themselves. Jeannette moves many times throughout her childhood and runs into problems while trying to do things by herself as a young child. People define the word homeless differently and become homeless for a variety of different reasons. In the Story The Glass Castle, Jeannette’s grateful attitude towards being homeless is different than most other homeless people's attitude.

Jeannette shows how she feels about being homeless many times throughout the book. When they are forced to sleep outside under the stars she says, “I told Lori how lucky we were to be sleeping out under the sky like Indians” (Walls 18). This is when the family was sleeping outside in the desert on one of their road trips. This quote proves that Jeanette has a different attitude towards being homeless. Most people would not be happy with sleeping outside in the open exposed to all the elements. But Jeannette has a different attitude and even says how lucky they are to be sleeping there. This is only one of many examples where she is grateful for not having a home, even though they go hungry most nights which shows that her grateful attitude towards being homeless is different than most people's