Quotes from Rick Bragg

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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 guess nostalgia is our sanctuary in sorry times.

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.

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

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.

The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can't really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve.

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.

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

For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again.

Yet how lovely, to think that a person can live forever as long as one last bird sings in the dying light of one more day.

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.

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.

a man should not be cruel to things weaker than himself

dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades.

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

and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown.

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.

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.

I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year by year.