Julia Derek > Julia's Quotes

“Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“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

“social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“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

“I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment