Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance. Quotes I

-There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor.
-The Blanton men were full of vice.
-I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle.
-The best way up for the hillbilly was out.
-Despite the setbacks, both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream.
-You can do anything you want to.
-Mamaw and Papaw may have failed Bev in her youth. But they spent the rest of their lives making up for it.
-When I came home and told Papaw about my heartbreak, he turned it into triumph. I learned multiplication and division before dinner.
-In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.
-Mamaw had done everything in her power to be better than the circumstances of her birth.
-We learned to value loyalty, honor and toughness.
-You never start a fight; you always end the fight if someone else starts it.
-Sometimes you have to fight even when you are not defending yourself. Sometimes it's just the right thing to to.
-God helps those who help themselves.
-He never apologized with words.
-The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.
-Those three years with Mamaw saved me.
-We spend to pretend that we are upper-class.
-I never saw only the worst of what our community offered, and I believe that saved me.
-Having a job and learning a bit about the world helped clarify precisely what I wanted out of my own life.
-I found a couple of teachers that inspired me to love learning.
-She promised that if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.
-No pep talk or speech could show me how it felt to transition from seeking shelter to providing it.
-Leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around.
-Surrounding me was another message: that I and the people like me were not good enough; that the reason Middletown produced zero Ivy League graduates was some genetic or character defect. I could not possibly see how destructive that mentality was until I escaped it.
-I loathed debt and the sense of limitation it imposed.
-The incredible optimism I felt about my own life contrasted starkly with the pessimism of so many of my neighbors.
-What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had from their own lives.
-The most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students.
-I stopped being ashamed: my parents' mistakes were not my fault.
-The wealthy and the powerful are not just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.
-Successful people are playing and entirely different game: they network.
-Social capital: networks of people and institutions.
-The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than good. Apparently having the right network is better than both.
-Life did not wait.
-The only way to take advantage of networking is to ask.
-Social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it prosper. Those who don't are running life's race with a major handicap.
-Not knowing things that many others do often has serious economic consequences.
-I realized then that I had a problem, that I must confront whatever it was that had, for generations, caused those in my family to hurt those whom they loved.
-Her marriage got even better, only after she realized that she did not have to be on guard all the time.
-Why do you fight with me like I am your enemy?
-I used words like weapons. That's what everyone around me did. I did it to survive. Disagreements were war, and you played to win the game. I did not unlearn these lessons overnight.
-The things I wanted most, a happy partner and a happy home, required constant mental focus.
-You have to stop making excuses and take responsibility.
-Mom deserves much of the blame. No person's childhood gives him or her a perpetual moral get out of jail free card.
-Upward mobility is never a clean-cut, and the world I left always finds a way to reel me back in.
-Mom instilled in me a lifelong love of education and learning.
-I think you have to have good role models around you, so you get to know different things. That exposure gives you something to dream for.
-They had a family member they could count on.
-Our high school ranked near the bottom of Ohio's schools, but that had little to do with the staff and much to do with the students.
-The real problem for so many of these kids is what happens at home.