Mailman Quotes

“To be present in time, in your own body, your spirit intact, your selfhood whole. It is a gift. And it will not last.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“Why grab a few ballots when you can just grab the whole US Capitol?”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“It’s always the small dogs that start shit.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“But I wasn’t a mailman anymore. I was just an ordinary person again. Just another white-collar ghost with a job that nobody understands.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“But work does not define us as humans. What I had missed in my decades of corporate life, the fundamental confusion I labored under. Was that work, was reality. All the years I had been working, the world went on. The sun on the clouds in the morning, the goodness of a decent lunch, the privacy of your own thoughts, the love of your children, the great gift of being a father in a loving family. I had been prodigal with the abundance of life.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“I'm driving as fast as this old crate will stick to the road, slipping in and out of the coefficient of friction and adjusting my trajectory with a little Kentucky windage at the steering wheel because I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long, and besides, this is where Google Girl says I need to be, headed toward the destination of the next parcel, and I would follow Google Girl's voice to the gates of hell like she was Satan's sweetheart because all summer long I've either been following her, the river, or the passage of the sun across the sky because without something to follow in this time-warp wilderness I'm just lost. Not spatially lost. Geographically, I know exactly where I am. I'm where I grew up, in the hardwood, sedimentary Blue Ridge Mountains, the heart of the Appalachians, the place I thought was home. What I'm feeling is a spiritual disorientation, lost in the sense that I don't know what I'm doing, lost on confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it's one of the great dividing lines in American life. I wonder if part of how we've become so atomized is that while we all work, few of us serve. It is service that gives life meaning, and it is service to our community and our nation that gives the ideas of "community" and "nation" meaning as well.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“Sometimes the heroic act is simply showing up. It's like being a parent. It's not about taking your kid to Disneyland or sending htem off to their first-choice college without student loans. It's the fact that you went to work every day to keep a roof over their heads, took them to the doctor, read to them, walked with them, talked to them, took them to their grandparents' place, kept them from drinking their weight in soda or playing on screens until their brains were as smooth as kidney beans. The act of being a parent is about the consistent sincere effort to create something larger than yourself, a family in which your child can grow up into a good daughter, good sister, good friend, good citizen.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“We had always been friendly but just ran in different circles. But we get older, and any connection to the past becomes charged with nostalgia. These witnesses to our younger selves tell us that it wasn't all some hallucination, that our younger bodies once walked the earth.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“When you order something from Amazon, the "one click" is the trigger at the beginning of a long global chain. And at the end of that click is the last mile. That "one click" queries cloud-based microservices for inventory and finds the closest fulfillment center. Robots pull the items off a shelf. The parcel zooms down miles of conveyor belts. Humans load it into trucks as palletized loads. Computers then coordinate the trucks, or the blue Amazon 737s turning and burning on the runway. Off to a regional fulfillment center, out to the USPS P&DC, down to the local post office, because all of Amazon's market and computing power comes to grief at the last mile. Those clicks are ultimately handles by old women who curse your nighest name and pray for your death, women who drove three hours to sort your stuff into wire cages and from those cages into the back of my 2012 Tacoma truck. It was good that we lived in this world when the pandemic came, or else millions more would have died around the globe. I am proud to have been part of this big system that helped us survive.

But I also cursed your name. Was curbside pickup too much to ask for your chest-of-drawers-sized deliveries of Variety Pack Quaker Instant Oatmeal? Was forgoing your Gatorade Brand Kiwi Strawberry Propel Zero Calorie Water with Electrolytes and Vitamins C & E too big a sacrifice?”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“When we are in trouble, the people who love us will come for us in the dark. They will come with flashlights and tow straps and whatever else it takes, if we just call out for their help.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“In psychologist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl says that even when everything has been taken from you, you can choose your attitude: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“THIS ISN’T GOING TO GET BETTER. THIS IS FUCK CITY. HOW HAS THIS BECOME MY LIFE?”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“I’ve always found hate alarmingly easy to access”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“To be present in time, in your own body, your spirit intact, your selfhood whole, it is a gift—and it will not last.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“The Postal Service has never seen the American people as consumers, but as citizens.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“Being great hadn’t led me to my essential selfhood. Sucking did.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“If you're wondering how I knew he was a Libertarian, then you've never spent any time with Libertarians, because all youi need to do is wait five minutes.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home