Rick Bragg Quotes

These were 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.

life is too short to dance with an ugly woman

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.

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

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.

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world.

One: Don't kill yourself.
Two: Don't kill each other.
Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain't fam'ly.

Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did.

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.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

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.

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot them, don't understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot.

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 love us boys. I never gave her a reason. It was just the kind of person she was.

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.

But I just stood there, trapped somewhere between my long-standing comfortable hatred, and what might have been forgiveness. I am trapped there still.

West Virginia is among the nation's leaders in military service, in killed in action, in medals for valor.

If you cannot eat what you want in the South, life is not worth living.

Newt thought that it was Charlie who was beating his wife to death, instead of the other way around, . . .. So he reached into his overalls pocket, fished out his pocketknife and flicked out a blade long enough to cut watermelon.
Ava took one look at that knife and flung her body across her husband, to shield him. Then she looked up at Newt, and when she spoke there were spiders and broken glass in her voice.
"Don't you touch him," she hissed.
. . .
Everybody has a moment like it. If they never did, they never did love nobody truly. People who have lived a long, long time say it, so it must be so.

Some people are just interesting. They can't help it. They just are.

She was as pretty as sunshine on roses.

Mature material. Where once he had hollered through

It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride.

In the Mountains, they cooked, too.
Joe Godwin made liquor in Muscadine. Moe Shealey made it in Mineral Springs. Junior McMahan had a still in ragland. Fred and Alton Dryden made liquor in Tallapoosa, and Eulis Parker made it on Terrapin Creek. Wayne Glass knew their faces because he drove it, and made more money hauling liquor than he ever made at the cotton mill. He loaded the gallon cans into his car in the deep woods and dodged sheriffs and federal men to get it to men like Robert Kilgore, the bootlegger who sold whiskey from a house in Weaver, about ten minutes south of Jacksonville. "I could haul a hundred and fifty gallons in a Flathead Ford, at thirty-five dollars a load," he said. Wayne lost the end of one finger in the mill, but he was bulletproof when he was running liquor, and only did time once, for conspiracy. "They couldn't catch me haulin' liquor," he said, "so they got me for thinkin' about it.

On every pack leaned an M16, except Lori's. Her son was playing soldier with it in the bleachers. There was no clip in it, which was a good thing.

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.

I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.

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.

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

I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian.
I just looked at them.
How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me?
I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn't know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back:
"Roll Tide.

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

Only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control.

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

You have never slept until you have been rocked to sleep by a willow tree, the whole think creaking as the wind pushes it back and forth. There was something about being up high, up in the green and the breeze, something safe about it.

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.

I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend.

That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.

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.

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.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.

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.

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter.

Everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you're going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.

They named him James, for Charlie's daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.

I guess it is what you do if you grow up with warnings of damnation ringing from every church door and radio station and family reunion, in a place where total strangers will walk up to you at the Piggly Wiggly and ask if you are Saved. Even if you deny that faith, rebuke it, you still carry it around with you like some half-forgotten Indian head penny you keep in your pocket for luck. I wonder sometimes if I will be the same, if when I see my life coming to an end I will drop to my knees and search my soul for old sins and my memory for forgotten prayers. I reckon so.