Quotes from Rick Bragg

because dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms...

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

Tupperware is the Wedgewood of the South.

He liked the cemetery. He told me once that it was where a man his age had to go to talk to anybody who could appreciate him.

But I don't think any dog knows home better than one thrown anway once already.

Sometimes you put yourself in a place in your life when a dog is the best company you can have.

Because everyone is an expert when it's not their dog in the road.

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. And who knows, maybe if I had bothered to get to know them better, maybe they had. Maybe they just didn't wear it like some bullshit badge of honor.

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.

How do you not love a dog with a toilet seat halo around its head?

People, she believed, were for the large part leaping dumbasses.

mature material. Where once he had hollered through

It is easy to tell a stranger's story; I didn't know if I had the guts to tell my own.

Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house him at Rikers Island His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000. Your tax dollars at work. (...) All around us are inmates who just want to go home. Mahes is already there. He has no expectations, so there are no disappointments: he does not envy people who are free, because they are free to suffer.

Self-righteousness is without a true bottom.

I had seen my mother cry from pain and grief and misery, when I was a child. I had never seen her cry from happiness until they called out my name and I walked up to get that prize, then handed it to her.

the unwritten rule of engagement had been "If it looks hostile, shoot it.

The Southern Christmas is rich in its traditions, its own beauties, its own recipes and notions and yes, peculiarities. It is why, no matter where we live in the world, we yearn to come home as time draws near. It is more than a cliche. The Southern Christmas is not one of television advertising. It is a sight better than that.

The dog wagged his tail, happy, it seemed, to find it still worked properly. He was not frightened, or glum. He had tortured a stupid cat, twice, and torn up not one fence, but two; it might have been one of the greatest days of his life, and the week hadn't even gotten started good.

I am beginning to think that the word "no," in his mind, registers as, Well, go ahead and do whatever you want to do. He backed straight away, pulling, and the collar slipped over his head. I tried to grab him by the scruff of the neck, but he evaded me and leapt back onto the bed, and burrowed under the blanket till he was just a big, growling lump. He is an outside dog, he rolls in mule manure. It wasn't that I would have to change the bed. I might have to burn it.

Does he bite?" the driver asked. "He even bites me," I said. He picked a fight with whatever the world brought him, and that day it happened to be a Lincoln. I don't think he would have hurt the driver, but he sure would have messed up a nice suit. The next week he did it again, and the next.

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

It was not that I sounded Southern--Southerners are some of the most pretentious people on earth--but that I sounded country, or since I was at Harvard, "rural.

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