72 Quotes by Rick Bragg

It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe

Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

But I am a Southerner, and it is our prerogative, being us, to remember things as well damn well please.

I know, nostalgia is a veil, a piece of colored glass.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe.

Passion is something you really don’t miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, “Boy, I wish I had a Coke.” The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.