72 Quotes by Rick Bragg

"I don’t know anything about wars. I don’t think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it."

"And, thought it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother and loved us boys. I never gave her a reason. It was just the kind of person she was."

"He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that."

"You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don’t."

"My Uncle Jimbo never challenged a man to a duel to defend his honor, but he did win a $20 bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. My grandmother prayed a tornado away, and punched a city woman in the eye."

"These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people."

"There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they’re not real writers. That’s ridiculous."

"That night, he just picked, and they let the liquor run through their blood, circle their heart, and soften their heads, like a pillow, without laying down."

"If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice."

"Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it’s just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working."