72 Quotes by Rick Bragg

"We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn’t open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can’t remember exactly which is who."

"To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well, something special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence."

"Some people are just interesting. They can’t help it. They just are."

"It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over."

"They, especially, taught me that you can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as you did."

"How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees."

"There was hope, not much hope, but some, that her husband would change. She dreamed he would stop drinking up his paycheck, stop disappearing for days, for weeks, for months. She dreamed he would stop running around and shaming her, dreamed she would not have to beg him for money for milk for the baby, Sam. She dreamed that this time it might be bearable, it might last. She didn’t want much, really, just something decent. All she got was me."

"He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms – accidental and on purpose – than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played."

"I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to – if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you."

"I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don’t need anybody."