Philipp Meyer > 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

“No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“The difference between a brave man and a coward is very simple. It is a problem of love. A coward loves only himself... [...] ...a coward cares only for his own body," Toshaway said, "and he loves it above all other things. The brave man loves other men first and himself last. Nahkusuaberu?"

I nodded.

"This" - he tapped me - "must mean nothing to you." The he tapped me again, on my face, my chest, my belly, my hands and feet. "All of this means nothing.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn't feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“People like him think you can apologize things away, that you can confess over and over until you are free to repeat your crime.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“If you hate me it is because I have morals.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“It had become clear to me that the lives of the rich and famous were not so differ from the lies of the Comanches: you did what you pleased and answered to no one.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“I went upstairs to my office. Lay in the dark among my books. The only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family. Maybe in my own country.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Perhaps another great ice will come and grind all this into dust. Leaving no trace of our existence, as even fire does.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“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

“The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all?”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“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

“They could not seem to grasp that what mattered was what you did. Not what you said or thought about.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Unlike the white, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Wild Spanish cattle were easily acquired with a rope - within a year we had a hundred head. Hogs and mustang horses were also for the taking. There were deer, turkey, bear, squirrel, the occasional buffalo, turtles and fish from the river, ducks, plums and mustang grapes, bee trees and persimmons - the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today. The only problem was keeping your scalp attached.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

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

“My brother began to cry out in his sleep; I started to shake him, then stopped. There wasn’t any dream he could be having that would be as bad as waking up.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“How are the Indians on cats?"
"I never saw one. Plenty of dogs, though."
"They eat the dogs, don't they?"
"That's the Shoshones," I said. "A dog or coyote is sacred to a Comanche. You would be cursed."
"But they do eat human beings occasionally?"
"That's the Tonkawas," I said.
"Never the Comanches."
"A Comanche who ate a man would be killed by the tribe immediately, because supposedly it becomes an addiction."
"Interesting," he said. He was scratching his chin. "And this Sun Dance they all talk about?"
"That's the Kiowas," I said. "We never did that.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

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

“I had never known there were so many people on earth.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Impossible to believe we are truly in God's image. Something of the reptile in us yet, the caveman's allegiance to the spear. A vestige of our time in the swamps. And yet there are those wish to return. Be more like the reptile, they say. Be more like the snake, lying in wait. Of course they do not say snake, they say lion, but there is little difference in character between the two, only in appearance.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating and other people's outfits. There had never been a place for a person like her.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“I have always found it interesting that white children take so quickly to Indian ways, while Indian children, when brought to be raised in white families, never take to it at all.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Follow your footprints long enough and they will turn into those of a beast.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

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

“I went upstairs to my office, lay in the dark among my books - the only comforting thing I have.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Only bullets and walls make for honest neighbors.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son