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 has a unique attitude towards being homeless.

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

attitude.
The Subjective Well-Being of the Homeless and Lessons for Happiness by Ed Diener, shows a study where they asked one hundred and eighty-six homeless people in different places in the united states, including foreigners about their satisfaction of life and if they have positive or negative emotions about being homeless. The point of this document is to show how people feel about being homeless and if they feel satisfied with their life. After their interviews with the homeless people Diener says, “In both our American samples respondents reported below neutral levels of life satisfaction while all three homeless samples reported high negative affect” (Diener 200). This quote shows that in all of their interviews with homeless people, they all had a high negative rating for their satisfaction of life. This shows that people would be much more satisfied with how they were living if they weren’t homeless. With all that said, this quote proves that Jeannette’s grateful attitude towards being homeless is different than most other peoples attitude.
Jeannette shows how she feels about being homeless throughout the book. Most homeless people don’t necessarily have a good attitude towards being homeless, but Jeannette has a different outlook. She enjoys how she is living and even tells her sister how grateful and lucky they are to be where they are. In Ed Diener’s study called The Subjective Well-Being of the Homeless and Lessons for Happiness, he found that the majority of homeless people that he interviewed had a below neutral rating for their satisfaction of life. With that said, Jeannette’s grateful attitude towards being homeless is very different than most other peoples attitude.