28 Quotes by Tony Horwitz

There are people one knows and people one doesn’t. One shouldn’t cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of “nostalgia.

I couldn’t think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature – even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.

Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I’d met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.

A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.

I’ve been here in Richmond for six years and I still don’t get it. To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we’re dedicated to no hope, no future. It’s like having a monument to unrequited love.