Jeannette Walls Quotes

It is remarkable how a seemingly insignificant action or event can change entire lives.

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever . . .

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

'The Fall' changed my life - that's not an overstatement.

I think we all want something to knock us on the head and change our lives.

When I started my program... there was a big clock in the corner and I looked and it said nine o'clock exactly. And it was funny, because when I was standing on the podium, it said exactly 10 p.m., and this whole hour had changed my life.

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away. During the following weeks Ford Perfect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox.

In every life there is a turning point. A moment so tremendous, so sharp and clear that one feels as if one's been hit in the chest, all the breath knocked out, and one knows, absolutely knows without the merest hint of a shadow of a doubt that one's life will never be the same.

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

Realize that little things lead to bigger things.

One little ripple started today could create a typhoon fifteen years from now.

For want of a naile the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

When one life changes, many lives are changed.

I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.

You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.

Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand.

In war, important events result from trivial causes.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever, the very next person who you stand behind in line or sit next to on an aeroplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.

What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.