J.D. Vance QUOTES

1 " A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began. Within hours, the man’s house began to flood, and someone came to his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying, 'God will take care of me.' A few hours later, as the waters engulfed the first floor of the man’s home, a boat passed by, and the captain offered to take the man to safety. The man declined, saying, 'God will take care of me.' A few hours after that, as the man waited on his roof—his entire home flooded—a helicopter flew by, and the pilot offered transportation to dry land. Again the man declined, telling the pilot that God would care for him. Soon thereafter, the waters overcame the man, and as he stood before God in heaven, he protested his fate: 'You promised that you’d help me so long as I was faithful.' God replied, 'I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter. Your death is your own fault.' God helps those who help themselves. "

4 " To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

5 " ...intricate stone carvings and wood trim gave the law school an almost medieval feel. You'd even sometimes hear that we went to HLS (Hogwarts Law School). "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

6 " For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated...We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom (p228)....I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. (p246) "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

7 " There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It's hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don't need to make it even harder on each other. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

8 " This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for mare spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper-class. And when the dust clears--when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity--there's nothing left over. Nothing for the kids' college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. "

― J.D. Vance

9 " ...bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

10 " I tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library... "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

11 " The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget - this, and not my subpar public school, was te real barrior to opportunity. "

― J.D. Vance

12 " Mamaw felt disloyalty acutely. She loathed anything that smacked of a lack of complete devotion to family. In her own home, she'd day things like "I'm sorry I'm so damned mean" and "You know I love you, but I'm just a crazy bitch. But if she knew of anyone criticizing so much as her socks to an outsider, she'd fly off the handle. "I don't know those people. You never talk about family to some stranger. Never. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

13 " There is a lack of agency here - a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. "

― J.D. Vance

14 " I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go. "

― J.D. Vance

15 " As I increasingly saw Mom's behavior in myself, I tried to understand her. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

16 " Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, and their skills don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground. The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it. "

― J.D. Vance

17 " Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right. "

― J.D. Vance

18 " What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

19 " I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

20 " Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. "

― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

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