American Rust Quotes

“You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“All the things you needed to know in life—you didn’t learn them until you’d already made your decisions.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“And then...it wasn't just that we lost all those jobs, it was that people didn't have anything to be good at anymore. There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and bones through their noses. Personally I don't care for it, but those things are inevitable. The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“this is what it means to get old, you don’t look forward to pleasure so much as easing pain.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard- you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. ”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“And one day...there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn't know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night...He didn't see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn't anything more to it than that. ”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“There’s probably never been an old man who didn’t think that all the young people were degenerate. Nature of youth and age. Painful to see the world changing without you.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“But of course they hadn't done anything. They'd all be born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They'd worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted- the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admtted how spoiled they were but underneadth, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.
Of course, she hadn't said word. She wished she had but she hadn't. It was easy now to look back and think these things, but at the time she'd wanted to fit in and go along with Bunny and think yes I deseve this happy life I'm living. ”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“Once you lost your dignity, that was it. Dignity is life.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“Being dead didn’t excuse your responsibility to the ones still alive.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“And one day even that work would end, and there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn’t know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“It was countless the pleasures of life there were millions, you could spend your entire life listing them, they were different for every person the feel of oak bark, light in a room, watching a big buck and deciding not to shoot it. It was a privilege you could lose at any time, he had taken it for granted, but he would change his life. He would make his life mean something. You could not go with the current and expect it to turn out fine, he had not known it before but he knew it now, he would change everything.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“It was his own choices. They never felt like choices while he was making them, but nonetheless they were. It was nice to think it was a vast conspiracy of others but the truth was something different.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

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― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“But even thinking that brought on an incredible isolation, a suspicion she'd always had, she didn't belong anywhere, she was going to outlive everyone she knew. She was going to be alone, the same as her mother. ”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“That was the thing about Simon and all the others, so pleasant on the surface, always knowing what to say, but underneath there was something else, there were not the kind to sacrifice themselves- they've all been taught they have too much to lose. ”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust