- Mary Ellen Walton: [while helping serve dinner] It must be awful to be somebody's wife and have to do this every day of your life!
- 'Grandma' Esther Walton: Well, if you don't learn to be a little more pleasant, you won't have that problem to worry about!
- Olivia Walton: [after John Boy has read her a poem for her birthday] John Boy, those words were just like listenin' to music.
- [pauses]
- Olivia Walton: I don't really understand what the poem meant, but I think those were just about the most beautiful words I ever heard.
- John 'John Boy' Walton Jr.: Well, I think the poem has a meaning, um, to me, it means that some things which may seem too simple, or unimportant, or even just downright plain, those things are really every bit as important and every bit as beautiful as the most magnificent things in the whole world.
- James Robert 'Jim Bob' Walton: [after Todd admits to having forgotten what it's like to be a kid] It's a mess! Everything you touch turns over. Everybody hollers at ya. Y'don't even get a chance to holler back. Everybody blames ya for everything even when you didn't do it.
- Todd Cooper: I think it's beginning to come back to me now.
- James Robert 'Jim Bob' Walton: It's awful, isn't it?
- Todd Cooper: Terrible.
- Narrator: [narration as John 'John Boy' Walton, Jr. reading from his journal] The peace and beauty of the land and sky around Waltons Mountain was a source of constant comfort to all of us during those difficult Depression years. Some of the changes that were going on in the world did eventually reflect themselves on our mountain, like the increase in the number of airplanes that spotted the sky. In particular, I remember an airmail plane that used our mountain as a landmark. My mother especially liked to wait for the plane to go over and, sometimes watching, she'd get the look on her face people have when they watch wild geese winging their way south to warm, sunny days.
- Narrator: Today great passenger planes plow through those skies above the Virginia mountains. Last year, one of them brought my mother to see us in California where I now live. We're expecting her again soon, and no doubt our thoughts and our memories will return to those early times when that era we called 'depressed' was so very, very good.