America Quotes

“THE SUMMER BEFORE COLLEGE Mick drove trucks for the Coke plant, big lumbering GMCs with slide-up side doors from which he pulled down wooden cases of bottles and slung back cases of empties, delivering to corner markets, restaurants and grocery stores in Rockland County. He loved the hard labor and the changing scenes and people, the sun hot on his face through the GMC’s big windshield and on his arm through the open window full of all the scents of summer – spicy fresh-mown alfalfa, sun-warm bark of beeches and birches, black-furrowed soil, the redolent pastures of cattle and sheep, the cool moist air when the road went over a stream. Wherever he sold, people upped their orders. “What I like,” one corner grocer said, “is you never let me down. You always come when you say you will.” Mick shrugged it off but smiled, “Isn’t everybody like that?” “The way you work, you’re gonna make somethin’ of yourself some day.” He drove on, one arm out the window, shoulder warm in the sun, wind cooling his face, in the friendly grease, diesel and sun-hot plastic smell of the truck. Of course you worked hard, everybody should. It made you happy. How could you not work when your family needed it? Tara waiting tables full-time at Primo’s Café on Main Street, Troy running the farm all by himself and delivering papers at four every morning; Dad’s salary at the plastic factory had gone”
― Mike Bond, America

“And – get this – when a government becomes destructive to those rights, then it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and make a new one.”
― Mike Bond, America

“But it’s really hard, he wrote Dad. This cult of blind obedience – I can see it in warfare, maybe, but not for learning? What are we learning? Not to think for ourselves? That’s what they’re inculcating and I’m not sure it’s good. And there’s too much pride in it, in this blindness – “I can be a better automaton than you” – Pride of the enslaved who will one day be enslavers.”
― Mike Bond, America

“For those who think,” he quoted Walpole, “life is a comedy. For those who feel, it’s a tragedy. So it’s better to think than feel, no?”
― Mike Bond, America

“To live as most people seemed to – blindly accepting life without trying to understand and live it in the wisest and most responsible fashion – was insane, the squandering of a unique and priceless gift.”
― Mike Bond, America

“the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”
― Mike Bond, America

“Americans had become other-directed, living in a desert of suburban superficiality, driven more by their peers’ values than their own.”
― Mike Bond, America

“Democracy is not possible under Islam. Islam means I surrender; the Koran does not allow independent thought.”
― Mike Bond, America

“To live well in the now you have to think sometimes about the future. We always live in what we’ve already made.”
― Mike Bond, America

“It was true you had to focus on every tiny note and the spaces between them but you also had to let your mind free like the bird rising into the blue heavens and white clouds, and if she could see the bird yet also listen to each tiny step between the notes then the music flowed and she felt proud and emptied and full at the same time.”
― Mike Bond, America

“Sunday’s for sleepin’ in and big family dinners and fixin’ tractors and takin long walks,” Ma said. “That’s enough religion for me.”
― Mike Bond, America